#kitsch – @nickkahler on Tumblr

In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for over a century.

Harold Rosenberg, “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism,” 1958

#harold rosenberg #quote #pop #pop art #culture #criticism #kitsch #art #nature #america #united states #fake art #fake #time #rocky mountains

nickkahler reblogged

archiveofaffinities

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Leaning Tower of Pizza, Green Brook, NJ, 1978 (via archiveofaffinities)

#pizza #food #parody #tower #architecture #leaning tower #building #retail #restaurant #kitsch

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The monumental is aesthetically suspect because it is tied to nineteenth-century bad taste, to kitsch, and to mass culture. It is politically suspect because it is seen as representative of nineteenth-century nationalisms and of twentieth-century totalitarianisms. It is socially suspect because it is the privileged mode of expression of mass movements and mass politics. It is ethically suspect because in its preference for bigness it indulges in the larger-than-human, in the attempt to overwhelm the individual spectator. It is psychoanalytically suspect because it is tied to narcissistic delusions of grandeur and to imaginary wholeness.

Andreas Huyssen, "Monumental Seduction" in Present Pasts, 2003