Top 100 Quotes About Kitsch
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll.
Saul Friedlander
#4. If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.
Odd Nerdrum
#5. Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.
Roger Kimball
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?
Richard Strauss
#11. People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.
Shah Rukh Khan
#12. A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.
Matei Calinescu
#13. Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.
John Bayley
#14. If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.
Charles Jencks
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
Don DeLillo
#18. Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).
Mike Curran
#19. 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
#20. Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch.
Mike Curran
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.
Harold Rosenberg
#27. 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
#28. I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
#29. High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.
Robert C. Solomon
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.
Karsten Harries
#36. Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
Odd Nerdrum
#37. Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.
Mike Curran
#38. Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.
Roger Scruton
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.
Tiffany Madison
#43. 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
#44. In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster
Milan Kundera
#45. Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists
Milan Kundera
#46. 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
#47. A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be ...
Hermann Broch
#48. One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.
John Bayley
#49. The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun.
Sting
#50. 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
#51. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Milan Kundera
#52. 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
#53. Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
Allen Ginsberg
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.
John Cusack
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.
John Bayley
#62. In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
Milan Kundera
#64. 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
#65. Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep.
Odd Nerdrum
#66. Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it.
Mike Curran
#67. Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.
Matei Calinescu
#68. No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Milan Kundera
#69. Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
Karsten Harries
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch
Karsten Harries
#74. You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.
Hermann Broch
#75. 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
#76. Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.
Theodor Adorno
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of ... kitsch.
Balthus
#85. The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.
Karsten Harries
#86. Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."
Gillo Dorfles
#87. The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation ... kitsch
Theodor Adorno
#88. Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.
Frank Wedekind
#89. What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
Richard Dawkins
#90. 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
#91. Kitsch lends itself to a definition in terms of a systematic attempt to fly from daily reality: in time and in space.
Matei Calinescu
#92. I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste."
Cy Twombly
#93. Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Walter Benjamin
#94. In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
Charles Jencks
#95. Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.
Saul Friedlander
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."
Hermann Broch
#99. 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
#100. Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch
Slavoj Zizek
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