Kitsch Research Articles

Kitsch and Art

Kitsch and Art

Grimaces on the Walls: Anti-Bolshevist Posters and the Debate about Kitsch

Grimaces on the Walls: Anti-Bolshevist Posters and the Debate about Kitsch

Lutz Rathenow and the Adenauer Prize. Some Thoughts on Politics, Kitsch and Literature

Lutz Rathenow and the Adenauer Prize. Some Thoughts on Politics, Kitsch and Literature

Kitsch and art

Kitsch and art

Cover Kitsch (SEI 4/96)

Cover Kitsch (SEI 4/96)

Making looking public: Clement Greenberg imagines the kitsch public1

(1997). Making looking public: Clement Greenberg imagines the kitsch public. Continuum: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 47-58.

From city-dreams to the dreaming collective

This essay discusses Walter Benjamin's development of 'dream' as a model for understanding 19th- and 20th-century urban culture. Following Bergson and surrealist poetics, Benjamin used 'dream' in the 1920s as an heuristic analogy for investigating child hood memories, kitsch art and literature; during the early 1930s, he also developed it into an historiographic concept for studying 19th- century Parisian culture. Benjamin's interpretative use of the dream cuts across Ricoeur's distinction between the hermeneutics of 'recol lection' and the hermeneutics of 'suspicion'. The political dream analyst seeks to discharge the 'fatal powers' of the ideological dream, while at the same time fostering the experience of waking in which dream elements may recollectively be grasped. Benjamin extends this dialectic of dreaming, interpreting and waking to the relation between historical epochs and the tasks of the materialist historian. Puzzling out the recent past's dreamlike rebuses may serve in the task of a present historical awakening.

The kitsch of death and peace

The kitsch of death and peace

Irony, Dream, and Kitsch: Max Klinger's Paraphrase of the Finding of a Glove and German Modernism

This article investigates Klinger's visual dream narrative in the context of German modernism. Walter Benjamin's discussion of the significant image and object in the context of modernity sheds light on Klinger's mythological justification of his narrative technique and on technique itself as a powerful instrument in a perceived crisis in artistic language and signification. Max Ernst's collage novel La Femme 100 tetes is seen here as a radical demonstration of Surrealistic technique, representing a dream world parodying and fetishizing the same cultural heritage as Klinger's Glove Cycle. A comparison of these series effects a suspension of Klinger's subjectivity and irony and exposes his content as kitsch.

Tacky Lasers are the Tiniest yet

Tacky Lasers are the Tiniest yet

On Kitsch and Sentimentality

On Kitsch and Sentimentality

Science as kitsch: The dinosaur and other icons

Science as kitsch: The dinosaur and other icons

On Kitsch and Sentimentality

On Kitsch and Sentimentality

Domesticity and Uncanny Kitsch in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Frankenstein

Domesticity and Uncanny Kitsch in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Frankenstein

Tacky answer to curious animals

Tacky answer to curious animals

Power, cult and kitsch

Power, cult and kitsch

Kitsch and Community

Kitsch and Community

Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Arts of the Quiché Maya

A partir des travaux linguistiques, semiotiques et du concept d'intertextualite developpe par J. Kristeva, analyse de la relation entre langage et culture chez les Maya Quiche du Guatemala : origine mythique des arts et des artisanats selon le Popol Vuh, structures sous-jacentes aux differents phenomenes culturels dont le tissage a motifs des echarpes et ceintures

There Is No Kitsch, There Is Only Design!

There Is No Kitsch, There Is Only Design!

Mayan Telegraphese: Intonational Determinants of Inflectional Development in Quiche Mayan

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.2307/413905.