Top 133 Kitsch Quotes & Sayings

Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

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.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.

Not all kitsch is sweet.

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

...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

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.

Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.

Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.

Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.

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.

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed by the concept of 'art'. What one person considers to be 'art' is often not 'art' to another. 'Beautiful' and 'ugly' are old-fashioned concepts that are seldom applied these days; perhaps justifiably, who knows? Something repulsive, which gives you a moral hangover, and hurts your ears or eyes, may well be art. Only 'kitsch' is not art - we're all agreed about that. Indeed, but what is 'kitsch'? If only I knew!

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles.

Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch.

Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into 'White Christmas', the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother's face. You seldom if ever have the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.

The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun.

A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.

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.

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.

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

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

One of the most inexplicable characteristics of the Germans is their love of kitsch.

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.

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.)

How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch

Don't we all have an itch for kitsch?

The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

Kitsch is very important to me.

It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

Working with Michael Shannon and Taylor Kitsch was incredible.

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

Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.

I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste."

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

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

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.

Art is a car, kitsch is a horse.

The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.

Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.

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.

Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

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.

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 power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

We are all kitsch on our deathbeds.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.