Download or read book On Kitsch written by Odd Nerdrum and published by Kagge. This book was released on 2001 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kitsch has long been viewed as fine art's poor relation, aping its form while failing utterly to achieve its depth of meaning. In "On Kitsch" Odd Nerdrum and others discuss the meaning and value of kitsch in today's world, and its relationship to art. For the first time in this volume, English-speaking fans have the chance to read the writings of Odd Nerdrum, Norway's most famous contemporary artist, or kitch painter, as he would refer to himself. This printing of a variety of writings by Nerdrum and others includes speeches, essays, and humorous pieces such as "The Kitch Questionnaire," and "Kitch Aphorisms." This book is an opportunity to discover the thought process of one of the world's most unique and compelling artists.
Download or read book Kitsch and Art written by Thomas Kulka and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.
Download or read book Kitsch More Than Art written by Odd Nerdrum and published by Schibsted Forlag. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kitsch is Odd Nerdrum's luxuriously produced apologia for the enduring relevance of the old master style. Containing writings and interviews by and with Nerdrum alongside hefty plate sections of both Nerdrum's own paintings and those by painters he sees as exemplars of a certain kind of figurative art, it is a bold attack on the foundations of modernism. In Nerdrum's view, what we call "kitsch" art is a consequence of modernism's "make it new" ethic. For Nerdrum, this insistence on novelty has permeated the thinking of institutions, critics, artists and the public, and has effectively suppressed what Nerdrum most values in a work of art: sentimentality, passion, pathos and the self-evident skill and emotion of sheer craft. By this latter value in particular, the kitsch painter is able to work according to knowable standards that painting prior to modernism has established--standards that are "more than art," for, as Nerdrum puts it, "the kitsch painter commits himself to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise." Kitsch is a manifesto that recruits figurative painters both old and new, such as William Dyce, Paul Fenniak, Sampo Kaikkonen, Isaac Levitan, Osiris Rain, Ilya Repin, Giovanni Segantini, Valentin Serov, George Tooker, George Frederick Watts and Anders Zorn, and situates their work alongside more than 70 of Nerdrum's recent paintings. Alongside essays, poems and plays by the artist, Kitsch contains an extended dialogue on the topic between Nerdrum and Maria Kreyn.
Download or read book Putin Kitsch in America written by Alison Rowley and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Putin's image functions as a political talisman far outside of the borders of his own country. Studying material objects, fan fiction, and digital media, Putin Kitsch in America traces the satirical uses of Putin's public persona and how he stands as a foil for other world leaders. Uncovering a wide variety of material culture - satirical, scatological, even risqué - made possible by new print-on-demand technologies, Alison Rowley argues that the internet is crucial to the creation of contemporary Putin memorabilia. She explains that these items are evidence of young people's continued interest and participation in politics, even as some experts decry what they see as the opposite. The book addresses the ways in which explicit sexual references about government officials are used as everyday political commentary in the United States. The number of such references skyrocketed during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, and turning a critical eye to Putin kitsch suggests that the phenomenon will continue when Americans next return to the polls. An examination of how the Russian president's image circulates via memes, parodies, apps, and games, Putin Kitsch in America illustrates how technological change has shaped both the kinds of kitsch being produced and the nature of political engagement today.
Download or read book Some Call it Kitsch Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism written by Aleksa Čelebonović and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1974 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some Call it Kitsch revives the delightful and evocative art our parents and grandparents cherished. These Victorian and Edwardian masterworks were the pride of great museums around the world, and a lightly disguised source of erotic stimulation to their viewers. But after the victory of Impressionism over Academic painting and the rise of "modern" art, these eloquent narrative depicting historical events, mythological scenes, religious tableaux, adn erotic landscapes gradually sank into total disfavor and were relegated to dusty storage bins and dismissed as Kitsch - the epitome of oversentimentality, pretentiousness, and bad taste. Today these paintings are once again taken seriously for their imaginative content and technical brilliance as well as for their nostalgic and often sensual charm. Prices are skyrocketing and exhibitions draw large and enthusiastic crows. Some Call It Kitsch is the first full-scale exploration of Bourgeois Realist painting in terms of present-day critical standards. Among the artists represented are Alma-Tadema (Greek and Roman scenes of splendor and debauchery), Tissot (upper-middle-class high life), Lord Leighton (icily Classical but thoroughly erotic nudes), and Boldini (portraits of Edwardian aesthetes and titled beauties). The author, Aleksa C̆elebonović, is Yogoslavia's leading book publisher and a distinguished art historian. Writing with great perception and wit, he brings to life a group of fascinating painters, some well known today, others forgotten for more than a century. French, German, Italian, English, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and American artists are represented, the majority for the first time in full color. A valuable feature of the volume is a section devoted to brief biographies of the artists. -- from dust jacket.
Download or read book Reflections of Nazism written by Saul Friedländer and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Five Faces of Modernity written by Matei Călinescu and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.
Download or read book Kitsch Deluxe written by Lesley Gillilan and published by Miller/Mitchell Beazley. This book was released on 2003 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s fun, it’s fanciful, it’s kitsch! Celebrate the art of cool imitation, fantastic escapism, and nostalgia for late 20th-century populist culture that lies at the heart of this lighthearted and contemporary design style. These 18 fabulous spaces are aimed at those who want to create a feeling of irreverence and fantasy in their homes while still maintaining a semblance of style and glamour—and the extraordinary and exuberant interiors include those of Zandra Rhodes in London and Pierre et Gilles in Paris. A riot of a book, packed with vivid colour, humor, extravagantly themed décor, and inventive low-budget ideas, Kitsch Deluxe is an essential read for devotees of the wacky, weird, and wonderful.
Download or read book My Silver Planet written by Daniel Tiffany and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.
Download or read book Kitsch in Sync written by Peter Ward and published by Plexus Pub. This book was released on 1991 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kitsch written by Monica Kjellman-Chapin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kitsch: the mere word evokes mental images of cutesy collectibles, treacly trinkets, sweetly sentimental scenes, thematically trite tabletop tchotchkes, or perhaps anemic appropriations of canonical works of art. Frequently dismissed as facile, lowbrow, or one-off, throwaway aesthetics, kitsch elicits responses that range from the sardonic smirk laced with derision to the grin glimmering with the indulgence in a “guilty” pleasure. Kitsch, however, is surprisingly mobile and complex, as evidenced by its recent renewal as “kitschy cool.” This ambiguity not only allows it to gesture towards a disparate array of artifacts and ideations, but also to be pushed and pulled in various applicatory directions. The contributors to this collection address the problem of how and what kitsch might signify, and approach the kitsch question as a complex, nuanced interrogative. They consider kitsch in relation to its historical association with pseudo-art, its theoretical underpinnings and connections to class, the deliberate mobilization of kitsch in the work of specific artists, kitsch as a form of practice, as well as kitsch’s traffic with race, patriotism, and postmodernism. The essays in this collection necessarily cut a wide interpretative path, mapping the terrain of the phenomenon of kitsch – historically, conceptually, practically – in multivocal ways, befitting the polysemous creature that is kitsch itself. Drawing upon art history, popular culture studies, philosophy, and visual culture, the authors’ responses to the “big” question of kitsch move well beyond habitual artificial boundaries, far beyond the simple binaries of good/bad, high/low, elite/popular, or art/kitsch, into far more complex, challenging, and ultimately rewarding territory.
Download or read book Kitsch written by Ruth Holliday and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers. Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilized – progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool – to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgment as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratized in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgments of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed.
Download or read book Kitsch written by Catherine A. Lugg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-05-03 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kitsch-or tacky, simplistic art and art forms-is used by various political actors to shape and limit what we know about ourselves, what we know about our past and our future, as well as what our present-day public policy options might be. Using a plethora of historic and contemporary examples (such as Forrest Gump and Boys Town), the author maps out how kitsch is employed in various political and educational sites to shape public opinion and understandings.
Download or read book The Changing Meaning of Kitsch written by Max Ryynänen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-26 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book inaugurates a new phase in kitsch studies. Kitsch, an aesthetic slur of the 19th and the 20th century, is increasingly considered a positive term and at the heart of today’s society. Eleven distinguished authors from philosophy, cultural studies and the arts discuss a wide range of topics including beauty, fashion, kitsch in the context of mourning, bio-art, visual arts, architecture and political kitsch. In addition, the editors provide a concise theoretical introduction to the volume and the subject. The role of kitsch in contemporary culture and society is innovatively explored and the volume aims not to condemn but to accept and understand why kitsch has become acceptable today.
Download or read book Crap Souvenirs written by Doug Lansky and published by Perigee Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the Signspotting series casts a gimlet eye on unfortunate souvenirs from around the worldNfrom the kitschy and crude to the downright creepy.
Download or read book Lucio Fontana written by Anthony White and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899--1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as "halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry," unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Relating Fontana's art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar "economic miracle." At a time when Fontana's work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance.
Download or read book John Waters written by Kristen Hileman and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters’s renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing “bad taste” to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine—to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society. This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist’s childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters’s satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Exhibition dates: The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019 Wexner Center for the Arts: February 2–April 28, 2019
