“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Six: The Grand March, Ch. 29
“Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Last update June 3, 2021.
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Do you have more details about the quote "Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion." by Milan Kundera?
Milan Kundera 198
Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023Related quotes
“The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.”
Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 7 (p. 162)
“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Context: Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Arnold Schoenberg
(1874–1951) Austrian-American composer
Arnold Schoenberg, in a letter to Alma Mahler, 1914 (after the outbreak of the First World War); as quoted in "Impressions of War" http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/impressions-of-war by Philip Clark, The Gramophone, 4 August 2014
Schoenberg's quote regarding: 'the bourgeois tendencies of musical reactionaries such as Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel'
1910s
“You can’t have your kitsch and your good taste, too.”
Ron English
(1959) American artist
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)