Word: kitsched
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...Hamburg mansion filled with minimalist art, describes her design philosophy as "less and luxe." She favors spare lines and expensive fabrics; she eschews loud colors and elaborate prints; she loathes accessories. She grew up in a modest Hamburg suburb and has said her taste developed in reaction to the kitsch and consumerism that dominated postwar Germany. "Ever since I was young, I would look at a woman and think she could look much classier, much more powerful, sophisticated and elegant," she says. "That's what always counted for me, not that obviousness that is the old way of seeing fashion...
...Orientalism and discussion thereof that crops up in the first half of the play--Mary: "English is a vehicle, and its engine is empire." Fanny: "Stuff!"--we're primed for a critique of capitalism, or for a semiotical analysis of post-war America. Yet the play's treatment of kitsch goes no farther than to make the point that '50s consumer products would look pretty weird to Victorian dames. For example, during their voyage through time the intrepid adventurers keep coming across egg-beaters. "Totem!" "Talisman!" "Taboo!" they conjecture, and develop the practice of spinning the beaters at one another...
...there, has agreed to sweep away much of the clutter of souvenir stores. Slated for demolition is a gimmicky gift shop near the edge of Glacier Point that obstructs the view of Yosemite's waterfalls 3,200 ft. below. Even the merchandise at remaining stores is gradually changing, from kitsch warbonnets and rubber tom-toms to local Native American handicrafts and products reflecting environmental themes...
Perhaps the most important imaginative relationships in young Dali's life were with people, not paintings: the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the future filmmaker Luis Bunuel. United in their loathing of bourgeois convention -- Dali and Lorca coined the term putrefact for any stale idea or piece of kitsch that offended their nostrils -- the three were, in fact, very different creatures. Bunuel never lost his anarchic iconoclasm, whereas middle age ended Dali's; but the films they made together (An Andalusian Dog, 1929, and The Golden Age, 1930) remain classics of provocation. For a few years, Lorca and Dali found...
...Havel's mind, brutality, stupidity and kitsch all belonged to the same local gang: dead-drunk communists and evil smells, ghastly heavy velvet drapes and torture. Havel's formula was a variation on Stendhal's rule: "Bad taste leads to crimes...