Profound sentences written on the concept of 'KITSCH'.
Christopher Hitchens on the news coverage surrounding Princess Diana's Death, and my first introduction to the idea of 'Kitsch':
Where the coverage has not been an objective coverage of an event, but this sort of forced recruitment of everybody into the same emotional mold. A great titanic outpouring of kitsch. Everyone is told that they're all part of a great 'We', and this great 'We' feels both bound together, and enormously moved, and hurt, by something that actually is a non-event.
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!
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running, and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking." All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.
~ Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
"behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison" (3.5.8). Now we know what that pervasive evil is: totalitarian kitsch.
The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. . . . Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. . . . Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of “kitsch men,” people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight.
~ Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfillment.
~ Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses