Quotes about kitsch (27 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is … there is no conclusion yet.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Love , Sense

“Happiness is pure kitsch; we come into the world to suffer and learn.”

Isabel Allende book La somma dei giorni

Source: La suma de los días

World , Suffering , Learning , Happiness

“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! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

Children , Tear , Grass , Success

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.”

Don DeLillo Running Dog

Source: Running Dog

Art

“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 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

Heart

“To tell you the truth, I am rather perplexed about 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?"”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

If only I knew!
1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953

Truth , Beauty , Art , Fashion

“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

World , Beauty , Communication

“That's what really interested me about India, the religious aspect-and the extravagance of it. There was so much of it; the temples had all these things crawling all over them. It was so alive and complicated compared to the relative austerity that I saw in Jewish and especially Protestant ceremonies. Not so much Catholic ceremonies, though. I always loved Catholicism for the same reason that I love Hinduism, they're so much alike: the kitsch, the colors, the incense, the saints and the pageantry.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love , Color

“But through the 1990's I developed signatures, somewhat radical and unmistakably mine. Francis Picabia remains my hero. The more you dive into his work, the wilder it becomes. He painted the skewed Cubist paintings that we all know. Then came the kitsch works. And he ended up doing these strange, abstract works that are impossible to grasp. Whenever you think you’ve got him, he’s always moved along. That’s what I aspire to do.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

1995 and later, interview in Kirkeby’s home studio, Copenhagen (2012)

Thinking , Painting

“In the United States dramatically, here fortunately much less so, the book store as we have known it is dying. In the United States it is now largely an emporium, featuring music, records, Christmas cards, a large range fo semi-cultural and kitsch products with books fighting for their actual spatial lives. In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good book stores have had to close, and what we have now are text book emporia which are not book stores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great book store has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a book store.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 27.
Do Books Matter?

Books , Music , Universe , Reading

“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Six: The Grand March, Ch. 29

“The scholars and critics all called it kitsch, everyone thought I was crazy to buy them.”

Luis A. Ferré (1904–2003) American politician

Quoted in a Forbes magazine interview in 1993 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/us/luis-a-ferre-dies-at-99-pushed-puerto-rican-statehood.html, on his acquisition of art pieces to create the Ponce Museum of Art, now the largest art museum in the Caribbean, and considered one of the best in the Americas.

“My tears are only triggered by kitsch.”

Cees Nooteboom book The Following Story

The Following Story (1991)

Tear

“On the artist, Charley Patton, who changed him: What happened was I was going out on a Saturday night, so I went into my mam’s bedroom, she’s got a double mirror, really kitsch 50s. So I’m in there, doing that, and she’s got an old alarm clock where the radio comes on, but she never learned how to do it properly. And it came on. […] I remember it was ten past three in the afternoon and it was winter, it was getting dark, and it was when the BBC had just started doing Telstar live things from America. It was some station in Memphis - one of those classic names, ‘RK 51’ or whatever. […] On it came and there’s this record. The satellite thing was a bit cloudy and it was a 78 record and there was compression on the radio, so it was this strange kind of musical blur with this voice coming through: Charley Patton. […] On that night I told the bass player of one of the local bands that I’d heard this record and it sounded weird, it sounded like a violin. He said, ‘No, it’s not a violin, it’s a slide guitar.’ I thought, ‘What’s one of them?”

Chris Rea (1951) English singer-songwriter

2017

Music , Learning , Winter , Change

“Without the background of a remembered faith modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not is some way a 'challenge' to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Avant-garde and Kitsch" (p. 86)
Modern Culture (2000)

Faith , Art , Way , Time

“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 (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html (1939), p. 19
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art , Literature

“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“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 (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Imagination

“Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.”

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

God

“Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music. His first essay in this genre is a masterpiece, the Fugue in E Minor, published in 1837 but written ten years earlier, when the composer was eighteen …”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 10 : Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch

Music

“In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things—like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Thompson (1991) Fast Foreword, from The American Replacement of Nature.

World , Education , Guy , Feeling

“Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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.”

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Context: In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

Question

“You can’t have your kitsch and your good taste, too.”

Ron English (1959) American artist

Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)

“The boundary between art and kitsch was negotiable, even porous.”

Alastair Reynolds book Blue Remembered Earth

Source: Blue Remembered Earth (2012), Chapter 7 (p. 162)

Art