Kitsch Quotes

Kitsch is: a species of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but soon palls upon the taste, and is rejected with disdain, at least rated at much lower value. ~ David Hume

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. ~ Clement Greenberg

The orb came about because I wanted to do this kitsch sweater for Prince Charles when he went hunting and fishing with his kilt on. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art. ~ Clement Greenberg

I want to be scared. I want to keep taking insane risks. I want to be scared because you're going to grow through that whether you want to or not. I don't want to play the same guy. I want to keep throwing curveballs to you guys and keep telling stories. ~ Taylor Kitsch

You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it. ~ John Lamb Lash

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man's most fatal creation, the devil's kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women. ~ Hanif Kureishi

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace. ~ John Bayley

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation. ~ Theodor Adorno

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted. ~ Slavoj Zizek

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch ~ Theodor Adorno

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them ~ Hermann Broch

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. ~ Umberto Eco

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster ~ Milan Kundera

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch. ~ Hermann Broch

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful." ~ Hermann Broch

Video games and computers have become babysitters for kids. ~ Taylor Kitsch

There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet. ~ Saul Friedlander

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical ~ Hermann Broch

Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion. ~ Odd Nerdrum

I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste." ~ Cy Twombly

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.) ~ Robert C. Solomon

The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted. ~ Karsten Harries

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. ~ Milan Kundera

It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. ~ Tom Perrotta

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. ~ Milan Kundera

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking."
All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder. ~ Milan Kundera

There's that stigma about New Yorkers, how they're so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway. ~ Taylor Kitsch

He knew nothing about werewolves but what was in the movies. He hadn't even believed they existed until he was attacked. The tall dude, though, knew.
Joshua managed to force his body to make a left-hand turn at the corner, and again once he was across the street, and then a third time. He came looping past the Kitchen Kitsch where the tall dude was standing in the hole in the wall.
"You're really conflicted about this running away part, aren't you?" the dude said as Joshua dashed past him.
"Yes!" He tried to put on the brakes but his body kept running. He could smell his own blood on the man and his body wanted nothing to do with that.
The dude wasn't standing in the hole as Joshua came looping back toward the Kitchen Kitsch a second time. Joshua was afraid he'd lost the man. He was so focused on the opposite side of the street that he nearly ran into the glass door that opened out in front of him. A hand caught him, jerking him into the building. ~ Wen Spencer

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort ~ Clement Greenberg

Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life. ~ W. Scott Poole

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art. ~ Mike Curran

There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and the next thing you know, she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly.
Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended towards religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me. ~ Robert Stone

We're the propaganda monkeys.
The digital download junkies.
The skunk smoking geezers
With an inflatable Jesus.
We're the kitsch and cool.
Divide and rule. ~ Harry Whitewolf

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff ... ~ James Ellroy

To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds. ~ Karsten Harries

I had someone very close to me say to me that hopefully I'll have many more ups and downs, not in just my career but in life. If you don't have that, you're not taking enough risks. ~ Taylor Kitsch

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace. ~ Pascal Mercier

Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it. ~ Mike Curran

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system. ~ Hermann Broch

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church. ~ Allen Ginsberg

I played pretty darn competitive-level hockey. Then the good old knee injury. Obviously, it's a blessing in disguise, but growing up Canadian, that's our religion, that's our football. ~ Taylor Kitsch

When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it. ~ John Cusack

Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists ~ Milan Kundera

Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths. ~ Saul Friedlander

I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious. ~ Michael Dorris

Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light. ~ Clement Greenberg

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition ~ Robert C. Solomon

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn. ~ Don DeLillo

Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. ~ Clement Greenberg

People hate cardio. I hate cardio. But pick the five top songs that you love. Do your cardio during these songs, and you're done. I'd say 95 percent of the time you don't even know you just did it. ~ Taylor Kitsch

How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment? ~ Nicolas Bourriaud

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. ~ Milan Kundera

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. ~ Milan Kundera

She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious.
The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community.
Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop. ~ Susan Wiggs

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. ~ Milan Kundera

People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful. ~ Shah Rukh Khan

In truth, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage. ~ Manohla Dargis

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. ~ Walter Benjamin

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears. ~ Milan Kundera

We now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of sin. ~ Bruce G. Charlton

In the first place, it's surreal to watch filming, to see the little ideas you had in your head and now Taylor Kitsch is doing it, or Salma Hayek. And then to see it loud and bright onscreen is a trip. ~ Don Winslow

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch. ~ Zoe Heller

I'm an all-or-nothing person. ~ Taylor Kitsch

Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch. ~ Milan Kundera

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century. ~ Harold Rosenberg

My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch, and that we be conscious and sensorially attuned to this world in this moment that we are alive. ~ Karim Rashid

I have like 20 snap-up shirts in my closet, and I never, never would have thought before FNL would I have had that. ~ Taylor Kitsch

The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation.

Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves.

The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything i ~ Jean Baudrillard

Don't we all have an itch for kitsch? ~ Matei Calinescu

Kitsch is not seeing something for what it is, but what you think it should be. ~ David Yoon

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme. ~ John Cusack

A lot of people are surprised to hear that an actor studied for two or three years. They take the craft for granted and wanna just wake up and be an actor. ~ Taylor Kitsch

Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is ... there is no conclusion yet. ~ Osamu Tezuka

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! ~ Milan Kundera

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium. ~ Roger Scruton

The connoisseur's hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so. ~ Paul J. Griffiths

I will not subscribe to the argument that ornament increases the pleasure of the life of a cultivated person, or the argument which covers itself with the words: "But if the ornament is beautiful! ... " To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way. ~ Adolf Loos

Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole. ~ Mike Curran

High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap. ~ Robert C. Solomon

I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch. ~ Steve Toltz

The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of "kitsch men," people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. ~ Modris Eksteins

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life. ~ Theodor Adorno

Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization. ~ Roger Kimball

It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. ~ Roger Scruton

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books. ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

And I'm not going to be my dad's clone. And women don't turn me on. And Oliver is my home." -Rusty (Christmas Kitsch) ~ Amy Lane

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch. ~ John Bayley

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel. ~ Milan Kundera

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of ... kitsch. ~ Balthus

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality. ~ Hermann Broch

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. ~ Martin Filler

I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. ~ Meghan Daum

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness. ~ Steve Martin

Art is a car, kitsch is a horse. ~ Odd Nerdrum

Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep. ~ Odd Nerdrum

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious. ~ Robert C. Solomon

How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch ~ Karsten Harries

Kitsch lends itself to a definition in terms of a systematic attempt to fly from daily reality: in time and in space. ~ Matei Calinescu