Too many of today's movie "thrillers" are kitsch. So are souvenir throw pillows of tourist attractions.
Portraits of Elvis on black velvet are kitsch. Kitsch is a German word that means "gaudy trash." It refers to art of a pretentious but shallow sort that is calculated to have popular appeal. "An experience can be camp," adds Deborah Emont Scott, Sanders Sosland curator of 20th-century art at the Nelson Gallery. If it's dead serious and still terrible, it probably qualifies as kitsch." "Her definition isn't correct, at least as we define camp today," said Craig Subler, director of the UMKC Museum of Art. Thirty years later, the definition may have shifted a bit. Sontag also wrote that "pure examples of camp are unintentional they are dead serious." Being merely bad isn't enough for something to qualify as camp, she suggested it also must have high aspirations and embrace the outlandish to achieve them. In her mid-1960s essay "Notes on Camp," the critic Susan Sontag listed numerous qualities of camp, such as its love of exaggeration and flamboyance. What's going on is camp, an aesthetic approach to popular culture in which artists adopt the corny conventions of certain forms in order to ridicule them. There's even a syndicated radio show featuring nothing but "bad music." Take The Brady Bunch, which is such a favored cultural touchstone of Generation X-ers that it's spawned long-running stage shows around the country in which live actors perform the same banal scripts used in the TV series.Īnd then there's Golden Throats, a CD compilation of more-or-less serious actors (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Sebastian Cabot, Mae West) attempting to sing pop songs (Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds). And the Ed Wood phenomenon is just the tip of the bad-is-good iceberg.
0 kommentar(er)
