Kitsch quotes
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In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
-- Charles Jencks -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
-- Odd Nerdrum -
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 -
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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 -
...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
-- Steve Toltz -
The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun.
-- Sting -
Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."
-- Gillo Dorfles -
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Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.
-- John Bayley -
One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.
-- John Bayley -
The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.
-- Karsten Harries -
Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
-- Karsten Harries -
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The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.
-- Karsten Harries -
We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles.
-- Karsten Harries -
How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch
-- Karsten Harries -
The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.
-- Karsten Harries -
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Not all kitsch is sweet.
-- Karsten Harries -
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 -
A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.
-- Matei Calinescu -
Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.
-- Matei Calinescu -
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Don't we all have an itch for kitsch?
-- Matei Calinescu -
Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.
-- Mike Curran -
Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it.
-- Mike Curran -
Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).
-- Mike Curran -
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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 -
It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.
-- Robert Scholes -
One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll.
-- Saul Friedlander -
Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.
-- Saul Friedlander -
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Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep.
-- Odd Nerdrum -
We are all kitsch on our deathbeds.
-- Odd Nerdrum -
Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch
-- Denis Dutton -
Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.
-- Denis Dutton -
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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 -
Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.
-- Frank Wedekind
