A Quote by Denis Dutton

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

Denis Dutton

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Absence Also Complete Irony Kitsch Mark Solemnity

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Denis Dutton
New Zealander - Philosopher
February 9, 1944 - December 28, 2010

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death.

Jess Bowen

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

Mike Curran

For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It's very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.

Marcel Wanders

Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is always dishonest.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal-unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

Simone Weil

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.

Hermann Broch

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Milan Kundera

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

Hermann Broch

I need an irony punctuation mark for the clueless.

Gene Weingarten

Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.

Karsten Harries

Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch

Denis Dutton

While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.

Steve Erickson

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

Julian Barnes

Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

George Will

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 Quote by Denis Dutton

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