Word: kitsched
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...Lillehammer Games began in panoply and kitsch, they seemed, especially to Americans, painfully ill-starred. From murder and mayhem to medical peril, from fatal accidents to merely mortifying tumbles, from wolf- pack aggression by American reporters to spontaneous affronts by the egalitarian hosts toward the pampered panjandrums of the International Olympic Committee, the news often evoked disillusionment or dismay...
Every painting in the show is kitsch by high-Modernist standards. And it is not easy to don the expectations of the original audience. The paintings presuppose a knowledge of Russian society, and above all a saturation with its period propaganda, that few in the West can claim. Why did it matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin...
...number of concealed jokes for the art-initiated, often genuinely funny ones -- as when, redoing Matisse's Still Life with "Dance" in 1974, Lichtenstein inserted a comic-strip blast of musical notes to give the figures something to jive to and popped a straw-bound Chianti flask (an archetypal kitsch symbol of the artist's studio) into the still life in the foreground...
Then he started doing other pictorial styles as subjects of his own. Picasso, Fernand Leger, Carlo Carra, Max Beckmann and so on. Then kitsch Modernism, as imagined by cartoonists. The trouble with these versions of Modernist classics 'n' clinkers is their sameness. After a while, it isn't very interesting to be shown that just about anything can be turned into a Lichtenstein, congealed in his cryogenic style. There's none of the engaged imagination, the sense of a transforming mind at work, that one gets in, say, Miro's wild versions of a 17th century Dutch interior, down...
...dome, crimson and cream splashes of title roofing and whitewashed walls merge in a hazy dreamscape technicolor. The cover seems to promise a self-indulgent, romanticized odyssey into a picture perfect landscape. But the text within reveals nothing of the sort: Doerr's crisp, pacific prose never lapses into kitsch other-worldliness in this captivating portrait of gringos in small-town Mexico...