Word: kitsched
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Perhaps Fellini, who like his stars is in his 60s, is copping a generational plea: "Our kitsch is better than your kitsch." Maybe he means for us to see the faltering but brave Amelia and Pippo as surrogates for himself, still worthy of sober interest, maybe even moral admiration, although the headlines now go to younger directorial stars. Certainly he insists on pumping out more of the "Felliniesque," his trademark blend of the grotesque and the surreal, than we need to get his point that TV is vulgar and coarsening. More moving is his presentation of two carefully imagined archetypes...
Among the few respectable things in that stew of American vanguard kitsch, the 1985 Whitney Biennial, was a large painting by a 36-year-old artist named Terry Winters. Done in a thick, ocherous impasto, which produced a paint surface that looked both lavish and summarily abbreviated, the image suggested (of all unlikely things) mushrooms: swollen glands like morels, crinkled and cellular, standing up in ranks like an array of mysterious brown balloons. It was odd to find any painting in such a show that addressed itself--however obliquely or eccentrically--to nature. But its relation to nature...
...pair of towers connected by wire mesh, is more of the same, a flibbertigibbet accretion of painted waves, plywood sea creatures, banners, arches, gables, windows, lights, action. Aubry's rigid canopy of pleated gold fiber glass, topped by a big wooden fish, is baffling but unequivocally vulgar--like kitsch from another planet, or a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cher. Powell's arch, with its oversize keystones, is a frolicking postmodernist fancy, circa 1980. Jahn has used the tensile imagery of naval architecture (masts, rigging, an upturned hull) to produce a fine object, jaunty but tough--a structure considerably more...
...would want their coffee, cars and airliners associated with Nazi imagery. So those flaxen-haired Madchens, village scenes and straining athletes are fated to crouch in the basement of art history, invested with a diabolic aura that in the light of common day would shrivel. They may be sodden kitsch, but to claim they are not a significant part of German cultural history is wishful thinking...
...kitsch doesn't stop there. John Harvard Collections' catalog sports men's and women's traditional cotton neckties, a specially acquired Mercedes-Benz automobile, and autographed books by John H. Updike...