Top 100 Kitsch's Quotes
#1. 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
#3. You never walk out of the gym and say, 'I shouldn't have gone.'
Taylor Kitsch
#4. In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
Milan Kundera
#5. I want to be scared. I want to keep taking insane risks. I want to be scared because you're going to grow through that whether you want to or not. I don't want to play the same guy. I want to keep throwing curveballs to you guys and keep telling stories.
Taylor Kitsch
#6. Put paying your dues and all that puts so much into being a success. You have an understanding of what it's about, being on your own for three or four years and living day to day on $3, or living in an apartment with no electricity.
Taylor Kitsch
#7. Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.
John Bayley
#8. There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.
Roger Scruton
#9. Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
John Cusack
#10. All of us alive today are or can be its prey, most of all the person who believes he is creating works of art when he is in fact creating mere kitsch objects.
Gillo Dorfles
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
Allen Ginsberg
#16. The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.
Clement Greenberg
#17. My sister is 16 and I tell her to take risks. Really explore and meet as many people as you can. Do as much as you can before reality kicks in. Have fun.
Taylor Kitsch
#18. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Milan Kundera
#19. It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
Roger Scruton
#20. The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun.
Sting
#21. One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.
John Bayley
#22. A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be ...
Hermann Broch
#23. Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.
Werner Herzog
#24. 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
#25. Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists
Milan Kundera
#26. In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster
Milan Kundera
#27. With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.
Peter Gay
#28. 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
#29. And I'm not going to be my dad's clone. And women don't turn me on. And Oliver is my home." -Rusty (Christmas Kitsch)
Amy Lane
#30. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
Slavoj Zizek
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
#35. 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
#36. You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.
Hermann Broch
#37. 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
#38. How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch
Karsten Harries
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
Karsten Harries
#44. 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
#46. No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Milan Kundera
#47. I'm never going to be like, 'Oh, this attention from women sucks.' It's flattering 99 percent of the time.
Taylor Kitsch
#48. Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.
Matei Calinescu
#49. Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it.
Mike Curran
#50. Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep.
Odd Nerdrum
#51. There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet.
Saul Friedlander
#52. People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.
Shah Rukh Khan
#54. Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.
Slavoj Zizek
#56. Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch.
Mike Curran
#57. 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
#58. Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).
Mike Curran
#59. Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
Don DeLillo
#60. 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
#61. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
Clement Greenberg
#62. If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.
Charles Jencks
#63. Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.
John Bayley
#64. A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.
Matei Calinescu
#65. Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.
Susan Neiman
#66. Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?
Richard Strauss
#67. 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
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.
Roger Kimball
#72. 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
#73. If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.
Odd Nerdrum
#74. One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll.
Saul Friedlander
#75. 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
#76. I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass.
Kevin McCloud
#77. The orb came about because I wanted to do this kitsch sweater for Prince Charles when he went hunting and fishing with his kilt on.
Vivienne Westwood
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.
Pope Benedict XVI
#81. Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
#82. Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.
Mike Curran
#83. For me as an actor, I use a lot of music. Music is a huge part of developing and getting into a certain mindset.
Taylor Kitsch
#84. Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Odd Nerdrum
#85. The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.
Karsten Harries
#86. 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
#87. And those Texas sunsets ... I work a lot in Africa: Texas and Africa have the best sunsets on the planet, that I've ever seen.
Taylor Kitsch
#88. I've always been intimidated by the technicalities of taking photos, especially with a film camera - not just a point and shoot.
Taylor Kitsch
#89. True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.
Tiffany Madison
#90. 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
#91. 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
#94. High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.
Robert C. Solomon
#95. 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
#96. I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
#97. 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
#98. Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.
Harold Rosenberg
#99. We now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of sin.
Bruce G. Charlton
#100. 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
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