Word: kitsched
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...BOTTOM LINE: Tharp and Mikhail Baryshnikov offer star power, high-flying moments and a little too much kitsch...
...weirdest talent in the show, because it is the most epic, obsessive and totally self-referential in its mixture of sadistic violence and kitsch daintiness, belongs to the Chicago recluse Henry Darger (1892-1973). Darger's rented apartment, after his death, turned out to be crammed with the output of a lifetime's obsession with innocence and violence, including a 15,000-page illustrated saga titled The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, a sort of madman's Iliad of endless carnage between adults and moppets. No "mainstream" artist...
...love American Politics. I love the kitsch, the glamour, the lies, the outrageous slander. However it is so overtly theatrical, a circus of the grotesque and iniquitous (is Ross Perot's campaign chief really named Orson Swindle?), that's it's hard to believe it really matters. When the candidates hurl statistics at each other, assign the problems of a nation to its deficit, or impugn each others' characters, we are lost in a sea of words and accusations, whose truth and importance lies beyond cognition. As campaign teams battle with Vietnam, or tax rises, they attempt to sway...
...does Crystal constantly want to redeem Buddy in the viewer's eyes? Why does the film go so moist just before the final punch line? Any Buddy could tell you: because kitsch is not just an anagram for shtick. In comedy the two are soul brothers -- the entertainer's way of saying "Love me, laugh with me, laugh at me, hate me, then forgive me and love me all over again...
...powerful and tender it can be. But as his friend Louis Scutenaire wrote, "Magritte is a great painter. Magritte is not a painter." He had no interest in what the French called la belle matiere, and when he did essay it -- as in a series of pseudo-pastoral kitsch- classical paintings in the manner of Renoir, done during World War II -- he subverted it; these hot, sluglike nudes are of a brutal vulgarity exceeded only by late Picabia, who may in fact have influenced them...