Kitsch quotes:

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  • Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque. -- Frank Wedekind
  • The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun. -- Sting
  • The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare. -- Karsten Harries
  • Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme. -- John Cusack
  • Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence -- Milan Kundera
  • Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church. -- Allen Ginsberg
  • No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. -- Milan Kundera
  • Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion. -- Milan Kundera
  • If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse. -- Odd Nerdrum
  • 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
  • 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
  • I did my homework and didn't go out much, and had a very highly developed kitsch fantasy life where I dreamed of being a dancing girl. -- Emily Mortimer
  • The 1970s 'Wonder Woman' was sort of a kitsch thing. It was a very specific time for that, and it's hard to modernize something like that. -- Maggie Q
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch. -- Robert Scholes
  • The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted. -- Karsten Harries
  • Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas. -- Clement Greenberg
  • The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch. -- Hermann Broch
  • Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep. -- Odd Nerdrum
  • Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system. -- Hermann Broch
  • Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying. -- Matei Calinescu
  • Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical -- Hermann Broch
  • Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation. -- Walter Benjamin
  • Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works. -- John Bayley
  • Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it. -- Mike Curran
  • Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces. -- 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
  • Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist. -- Harold Rosenberg
  • 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
  • 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 generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism. -- Hermann Broch
  • 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
  • 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
  • Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts... -- Theodor Adorno
  • 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
  • Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse. -- Jean Baudrillard
  • Don't we all have an itch for kitsch? -- Matei Calinescu
  • If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen. -- Charles Jencks
  • A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch. -- Matei Calinescu
  • Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse). -- Mike Curran
  • In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique. -- Charles Jencks
  • In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation. -- Theodor Adorno
  • People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful. -- Shah Rukh Khan
  • The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful." -- Hermann Broch
  • With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch. -- Peter Gay
  • 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
  • I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass. -- Kevin McCloud
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch. -- Jon Landau
  • 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
  • Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite. -- Anne Enright
  • Not all kitsch is sweet. -- Karsten Harries
  • We are all kitsch on our deathbeds. -- Odd Nerdrum
  • Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch -- Slavoj Žižek
  • Art is a car, kitsch is a horse. -- Odd Nerdrum
  • One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch. -- John Bayley
  • Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths. -- Saul Friedlander
  • Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch. -- Roger Scruton
  • Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch. -- Denis Dutton
  • Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch -- Denis Dutton
  • Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole. -- Mike Curran
  • If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch. -- Balthus
  • ...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch. -- Steve Toltz
  • Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion. -- Odd Nerdrum
  • The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious. -- Robert C. Solomon
  • We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles. -- Karsten Harries
  • Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch. -- Mike Curran
  • High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap. -- Robert C. Solomon
  • The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch -- Theodor Adorno
  • In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. -- Milan Kundera
  • Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch? -- Richard Strauss
  • I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste." -- Cy Twombly
  • You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch. -- Hermann Broch
  • Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace. -- John Bayley
  • The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch. -- Karsten Harries
  • Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality." -- Gillo Dorfles
  • Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn. -- Don DeLillo
  • Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. -- Walter Benjamin
  • A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be... -- Hermann Broch
  • True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch. -- Tiffany Madison
  • How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch -- Karsten Harries
  • One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll. -- Saul Friedlander
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch. -- Robert Musil
  • The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void. -- Pope Benedict XVI
  • 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
  • Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please. -- Denis Dutton
  • 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 Žižek
  • 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 Žižek
  • All of us alive today are or can be its prey, most of all the person who believes he is creating works of art when he is in fact creating mere kitsch objects. -- Gillo Dorfles
  • There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition. -- Roger Scruton
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