What is kitsch for you? Is it an evil manifestation of bad taste or the only sentimentality left in our modern world? This question has kept sociologists, philosophers and artists busy and here are 20 quotes that try to capture the essence of kitsch.
Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
John Cusack
Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
Theodor Adorno
Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty – its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical.
Hermann Broch
Kitsch is indeed totally incompatible with even the mildest form of questioning; that is, with irony. Kitsch always means what it says, and says it literally.
Tomas Kulka
Kitsch is the corpse that’s left, once art has lost its anger.
Anon
Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious.
Roger Scruton
Contemporary kitsch is a product of egalitarianism, and television and photography have so much accustomed us to the innumerable sophisticated variations on its archetypes that we take them for granted, however much we may deride the archetypes themselves. Besides, at some points in its range, kitsch is an inescapable human necessity.
John Bayley
Pin for later
…I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.
Frank Wedekind
Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they’ll wake up with kitsch.
Mike Curran
Everything is tacky, if you will. Music as a whole is kitsch, kitsch is art, literature itself is tacky. Every emotion is kitschy, almost by definition, but also any reflection, and even, in a sense, action. The only thing that is absolutely not kitsch, is nothingness.
Michel Houellebecq
Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists.
Milan Kundera
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
In paradise there would be no kitsch. The eye of the theologian sees the soil of kitsch in the consequences of the original sin.
Richard T. Egenter
Kitsch is certainly not “bad art,” it forms its own closed system.
Hermann Broch
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimination.
Winfried Menninghaus
Indeed, what makes sweet kitsch kitsch seems to be that it is flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition, its timeliness, and the fact that it stimulates the very best (in any case, the nicest) emotions–the “soft” sentiments of kindness and sympathy and the calm passions of delight.
Robert C. Solomon
Kitsch is a time capsule with a two-way ticket to the realm of myth – the collective or individual land of dreams.
Celeste Olalquiaga
The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.
Karsten Harries
To write or not to write
15 Quotes on Art
All picture quotes by be kitschig blog with the help of awesome people on Pixabay.
Milan Kundera got it right!
Spot on! 😉
Kitsch illustrates that human beings are quirky, sentimental, complex, and confusing.
Maybe our confusing complexity makes us sentimantal &quirky? Those are great words to sum this up
That’s bizarre! I commented on another blogger’s post this morning, recommending she visit Mont Martre if she goes back to Paris because she’d gone on a hop on hop off bus trip to see the sites and came away hating Paris and all the (other) tourists. And I liked the “going to bed with beauty, waking up with kitsch” quote best, too.
Funny, there are days like that. Maybe play the lottery today? 😉
Agree with many of quotes. Kitsch is extremely dangerous. The Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre is the epitomy of Kitsch. 🙂
Damn, I need to go to Paris some day
Do. It still is a lovely place with all its faults, and despite the French psychorigidity… 😉
Ages ago I have been to Paris and Jim Morrison’s stone had been removed for restauration from Père Lachaise. That seemed like a typical French twist to me, they can make life so meh sometimes …
Meh indeed. 🙂 Most times I don’t understand them any more. Been away too long I guess. 🙂 Latest I heard about the Jim Morrison tomb is that it’s been fenced off. Typical Frog. Fences, barriers, limits, ceilings… Meh indeed. Regardless, It is still worth the trip. I can tell: just spent 6 weeks there. Not meh at all. Tschüss.
“The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.”
Of course I like this one the best! 🙂 Mermaid-approved!
He he, thank you for the mermaid praise
Oh what a variety! It’s like being whip-lashed by whip lash! 😊 My fav (among many) was – “Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they’ll wake up with kitsch.” Mike Curran
It’s quite a collection. Funny thing is, I’m not running out on kitschy quotes any time soon
That’s a wonderful situation to have! So many of them we’ve heard here and there & yet they’re often still so surprising, in a good way, lol! ❤️
Some brilliant quotes!
Thanks!