A Quote by Matei Calinescu

Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying. — © Matei Calinescu
Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.
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.)
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.
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.
Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.
Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical
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.
The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.
Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression.
I specifically did not read other First Ladies' books, because I didn't want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role - very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.
We have defined art as the life form and aesthetic art as the life renewal: the stimulating, animating, agitating, inspiring, inspirational, fermenting, fascinating fanaticising, explosive and outrageous: the renewal of the unknown.
Typically, I would say that I'm not defined by one loss and I'm not defined by one win. But I'd be lying if I told you I didn't harp on the loss at Madison Square Garden.
How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion's aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.
Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."
Originality is another criterion of aesthetic value. We may formulate an originality principle, according to which highly valuable works of art provide hitherto unavailable insights.... Notice that, although originality is a necessary condition of high aesthetic value, it is far from a sufficient condition. Many original works have little or no aesthetic value. An artwork may present a novel but uninteresting perspective, or one that is original but wrong.
The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.
While a forgery illegally exploits the elitist taste for rarity, a kitsch object insists on its anti elitist availability. The deceptive character of kitsch does not lie in whatever it may have in common with actual forgery but in its claim to supply its consumers with essentially the same kinds and qualities of beauty as those embodied in unique or rare and inaccessible originals.
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