A Quote by Theodor Adorno
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.
Related Quotes
The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort
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.
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.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."
Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch
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.
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.
The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience
We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better.... or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do.... But at this precise moment, you also realize that you can change your future by bringing the past into the present. Past and future only exist in our mind. The present moment, though, is outside of time, it's Eternity.... It isn't what you did in the past the will affect the present. It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
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.
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.
'Neon Future' is, in short, a positive outlook on human progress and technology, looking forward to a bright, colorful utopia. It's embracing the future and looking toward the future in a more optimistic way.
In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
Pride is a deeply rooted ailment of the soul. The penalty is misery; the remedy lies in the sincere, life-long cultivation of humility, which means true self-evaluation and a proper perspective toward past, present and future.
Related Authors
Auguste Comte Quotes
French
Sociologist
C. Wright Mills Quotes
American
Sociologist
Charles Horton Cooley Quotes
American
Sociologist
Deborah Tannen Quotes
American
Sociologist
Emile Durkheim Quotes
French
Sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes
American
Sociologist
Ivan Illich Quotes
American
Sociologist
James W. Loewen Quotes
American
Sociologist
Jane Jacobs Quotes
American
Sociologist
Jean Baudrillard Quotes
French
Sociologist
Lewis Mumford Quotes
American
Sociologist
Marshall McLuhan Quotes
Canadian
Sociologist
Matthew Desmond Quotes
American
Sociologist
Peter L. Berger Quotes
Austrian
Sociologist
Samuel P. Huntington Quotes
American
Sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman Quotes
Polish
Sociologist