Quotes & Sayings About Kitsch

One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll. — Saul Friedlander

My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch, and that we be conscious and sensorially attuned to this world in this moment that we are alive. — Karim Rashid

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite. — Anne Enright

I have like 20 snap-up shirts in my closet, and I never, never would have thought before FNL would I have had that. — Taylor Kitsch

I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this, so you will understand that my antipathy toward 'Love Story' is not because I am immune to either sentimentality or garbage, two qualities the book possesses in abundance. When I read 'Love Story', and I cried, in much the same way that I cry from onions, involuntarily and with great irritation, I was deeply offended ... — Nora Ephron

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. — Roger Scruton

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

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 ... — Theodor Adorno

I admire an actor that can do a lot with doing nothing really, for the most part. I like doing a lot by doing so little. — Taylor Kitsch

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

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

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

We're the propaganda monkeys.
The digital download junkies.
The skunk smoking geezers
With an inflatable Jesus.
We're the kitsch and cool.
Divide and rule. — Harry Whitewolf

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. — Milan Kundera

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. — Milan Kundera

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! — Milan Kundera

I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. — Meghan Daum

If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the 'age of kitsch.' — Hermann Broch

Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists — Milan Kundera

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

There's that stigma about New Yorkers, how they're so mean, but in my experience it was quite the opposite. People were very genuine and very nice, even on the subway. — Taylor Kitsch

Political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch. — Milan Kundera

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? — Robert Musil

I would do 'John Carter' again tomorrow. I'm very proud of 'John Carter.' Box office doesn't validate me as a person, or as an actor. — Taylor Kitsch

Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it. — Mike Curran

One dominant response to the Great War was "disillusion" and a repudiation of principles named by such lofty abstractions as Honor, Patriotism, Virtue, and Beauty. It is easy to find examples of that solvent at work. But in another sense, the response to the war, especially on the continent, and most particularly in Germany, was just the opposite: it was what we might call the re-enchantment, the re-illusioning, of the world by means of a wholesale embrace of empty abstractions. The re-enchantment was malign, to be sure, but it was also thoroughgoing. Nazism was the most poisonous effort.It was, as [Modris] Eksteins puts it, "an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world." This is where kitsch comes in. — Roger Kimball

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace. — John Bayley

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books. — Rosamunde Pilcher

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life. — Theodor Adorno

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch. — John Bayley

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things. — Walter Benjamin

When I'm not acting, I try to be normal, play golf, play hockey. It's funny because you're in this little bubble when you're working - you don't read books, you don't really keep up with the news, you're just living that life. — Taylor Kitsch

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster — Milan Kundera

I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious. — Michael Dorris

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. — Theodor Adorno

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking."
All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder. — Milan Kundera

The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch. — Karsten Harries

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

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

People hate cardio. I hate cardio. But pick the five top songs that you love. Do your cardio during these songs, and you're done. I'd say 95 percent of the time you don't even know you just did it. — Taylor Kitsch

I'm never going to be like, 'Oh, this attention from women sucks.' It's flattering 99 percent of the time. — Taylor Kitsch

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 — Clement Greenberg

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism. — Hermann Broch

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

The connoisseur's hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well-designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so. — Paul J. Griffiths

Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse). — Mike Curran

A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfilment. — Theodore Dalrymple

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art. — Mike Curran

It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch. — Robert Scholes

There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in the big city. The original whore with the heart of gold. Used to be a nice Jewish girl, and the next thing you know, she's fucking the buckos of the Tenth Legion Fratensis, fucking the pilgrims who'd made their sacrifice at the Temple and were ready to party, the odd priest and Levite on the sly.
Maybe she was smart and funny. Certainly always on the lookout for the right guy to take her out of the life. Like a lot of whores, she tended towards religion. So along comes Jesus Christ, Mr. Right with a Vengeance, Mr. All Right Now! Fixes on her his hot, crazy eyes and she's all, Anything, I'll do anything. I'll wash your feet with my hair. You don't even have to fuck me. — Robert Stone

If I'd had a friend next to me, I would have squeezed her arm and said, Can you believe this? - but kitsch wasn't kitsch if you were alone. — Emma Straub

I'm an all-or-nothing person. — Taylor Kitsch

Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is
or as it will be by the time the credits come up. — Susan Neiman

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. — Harold Rosenberg

Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life. — W. Scott Poole

The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man's most fatal creation, the devil's kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women. — Hanif Kureishi

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch. — Zoe Heller

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel. — Milan Kundera

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

Don't we all have an itch for kitsch? — Matei Calinescu

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

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

I don't do the L.A. scene. I stay focused and very myopic. I don't feel I need to prove myself or be in people's faces, especially in this town. — Taylor Kitsch

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! — M.C. Escher

I had someone very close to me say to me that hopefully I'll have many more ups and downs, not in just my career but in life. If you don't have that, you're not taking enough risks. — Taylor Kitsch

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. — Milan Kundera

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

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

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.) — Robert C. Solomon

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them — Hermann Broch

What is current in the media is definitive. Sin can be made into virtue, virtue into sin; propaganda can be made into truth, truth into propaganda; beauty can be reframed as Kitsch and ugliness celebrated as beauty. — Bruce G. Charlton

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality. — Hermann Broch

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

A lot of people are surprised to hear that an actor studied for two or three years. They take the craft for granted and wanna just wake up and be an actor. — Taylor 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. — Karsten Harries

In the first place, it's surreal to watch filming, to see the little ideas you had in your head and now Taylor Kitsch is doing it, or Salma Hayek. And then to see it loud and bright onscreen is a trip. — Don Winslow

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 pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn. — Don DeLillo

If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse. — Odd Nerdrum

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist. — Harold Rosenberg

It felt like religious kitsch, as tacky as a black velvet painting, the kind of fantasy that appealed to people who ate too much fried food, spanked their kids, and had no problem with the theory that their loving God invented AIDS to punish the gays. — Tom Perrotta

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

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

Most of the time, the songs have jokes in them, little sarcastic things, or purposely kitsch or something. So that's going along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of stuff and laughing at stuff that's serious. And sometimes it's a good idea to put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's all right just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them. — Paul Simon

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition — Robert C. Solomon

Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch? — Richard Strauss

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation. — Walter Benjamin

The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch. — Jon Landau

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

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

The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted. — Karsten Harries

I would murder to play Gambit again! — Taylor Kitsch

Art is a car, kitsch is a horse. — Odd Nerdrum

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

I played pretty darn competitive-level hockey. Then the good old knee injury. Obviously, it's a blessing in disguise, but growing up Canadian, that's our religion, that's our football. — Taylor Kitsch

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff ... — James Ellroy

Not all kitsch is sweet. — Karsten Harries

Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque. — Frank Wedekind

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

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