Re.: But I have left out garden gnomes.
You are not up-to-date:
http://www.unicahome.com/p4516/kartell/starck-gnomes-tables-stools-by-philippe-starck-for-kartell.html
simulacra of simulacra of .. in pure plastic.
Very interesting your remark on coalescing forces.
p.s.: there is only one thing I like of Jeff Koons: Cicciolina!
The greatest kitsch ever.
On 10/27/07, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> <snip>
> I don't think it's any truer that kitsch is the commodification of
> high culture. [MW]
> <snip>
>
> Perhaps _dominant_ would have been better, with less sense of
> consecration:
> kitsch as the impression of democracy without the underlying reality,
> sneered at from the sidelines. I wouldn't underrate its dangers BTW.
>
> During what were (perhaps) its 19th C origins somewhere in Germany you
> bought (having made a little money) the trappings of advancement off the
> peg; but what you actually got were very bad paintings, almost a sort of
> Giffen good, because you couldn't afford the good ones or couldn't tell
> the
> difference. And then, of course, all those miniatures of the Eiffel Tower,
> those fake furs, faux wood, all those cocktail cabinets...
>
> The sneer that's often used for kitsch was also used for fish knives
> incidentally; Cf Betjeman. Here the point was, presumably, that fish
> knives
> were owned only by someone who had also 'bought his own furniture'.
>
> But I have left out garden gnomes. Though that's maybe not their loss. Or
> indeed yours necessarily.
>
> <snip>
> Jeff Koons achieves kitsch, for instance, equally by appropriating already
> kitsch children's toys and greek sculpture. [MW]
> <snip>
>
> Just as *irony* and *sentimentality* come to blows over feigned emotion,
> over who is swindling whom exactly, so *kitsch* and *camp* are a sort of
> argument over subjectivity. On the one hand, the _creation_ of kitsch is
> objectifying, commodifying and all those boo! hiss! things. Whereas, on
> the
> other, the _recognition_ of kitsch is (at least potentially) a form of
> camp,
> a sort of emperor's clothes moment which returns the subject back to the
> thick of things, where it belongs.
>
> Koons (whom I also abhor) is certainly making use of *camp*, as indeed you
> go on to suggest. However, the stuff used by the great commodity broker
> isn't employed to promote some sort of helpful break but to _anaesthetise_
> instead. Thus the gap between *kitsch* and *camp* becomes so narrow that
> they almost coalesce. (The analogy might be with Warhol's *Marilyns*,
> where
> the gap between the set comprising these works and some notional set of
> monetary tokens likewise reduces to zero.)
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'The possibility now arises that art will no longer find time to
> adapt somehow to technological processes.'
> (Walter Benjamin)
>
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