Kitsch: the World of Bad Taste

This long-out-of-print book will open your eyes to the avalanche of junk that makes up popular culture. Just one look at the titles in this eye-popping collection of essays, photos, and illustrations, published in 1968, indicates, really, that bad taste knows no bounds. "Death," "Christian kitsch," "Tourism and nature," "Politics," and "Pornokitsch and morals" are just a few of the topics surveyed by then-contemporary writers and critics. Also included is Clement Greenberg's essay "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published originally in 1939, tracing the rise of art in the service of totalitarian regimes. The book was first published in Italy and many of the photographs and illustrations are from European sources, but anyone who thinks of The Lone Ranger when listening to "The William Tell Overture" has been influenced by kitsch. Some of the academic essays have not aged well, even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks" -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years! Fascinating, funny, and full of hideously bad art, this book is a wonderland of the high-brow, the low-brow, and the no-brow of taste. In a pop-culture blender that makes no such distinctions, how else can you explain the success of "American Idol"? It's definitely time for a reprint. For more about this title visit BellemeadeBooks at Blogger.com

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It is a copiously illustrated collection of essays by multiple authors, including Aleksa Celebonovic, Clement Greenberg, Hermann Broch, Ludwig Giesz, John McHale, Karl Pawek, Lotte Eisner, Ugo Volli, Vittorio Gregotti, and Gillo Dorfles. Though the pictures are somewhat annoying, the essays are truly thought-provoking, especially the one by Hermann Broch. In "Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste," Dorfles and the essayists probe into the psychological cravings for kitsch, and offer some disturbing conclusions. Film, tourism, art, religion, politics, and pornography are covered in the selections.This is a book to which I turn, time and again, when I feel overwhelmed by the tasteless tides of popular culture.