Word: kitsched
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...most prominent and popular of U.S. weavers, Helena Hernmarck, has set herself totally against this modern orthodoxy. Hernmarck weaves an unabashed photorealism, often actually working from photographs. This may sound like kitsch. But when observed and contemplated day in, day out, Hernmarck's transformations of photo images into large wool, linen and cotton thread weavings are often stunning and always pleasurable artistic experiences. They are, in fact, a sort of return to the pictorial tapestry tradition of the Renaissance...
Tsongas writes of how he will "partake of God's blessings" That's part true sentiment and part bathetic kitsch born of too many smiles, speeches, handshakes and babies kissed. We can, however, afford Tsongas the too noble sentiments in order to learn about sentiments that are infinitely more mundane-but more important...
...that level, Purple Rain works. The stage struts, the soundtrack--in itself worth the price of admission--and the high-camp, high-kitsch style create a spectular vehicle for Prince. The trappings and antics make for an entertaining change from smoother, more packaged summer fare. What one thinks of Prince, of course, is a debatable question of taste. The teenyboppers on my left, breathing heavily one minute, running for popcorn the next, "really, really loved him." The friend on my right looked pensive. "You know," he mused, "if Oscar Wilde were alive today, I think he'd be Prince...
Thus La Pittura Colta: the revenge of late De Chirico on modernism. A decade ago, nobody wanted the historicist kitsch that Giorgio de Chirico, the master of metaphysical painting who became the laureate of Fascist taste, produced after 1925. Today his work goes for big prices and is assiduously promoted. It is therefore not surprising that the Biennale should devote several rooms to him. However, the qualities of La Pittura Colta go far beyond, or below, De Chirico's fussy homages to Rubens, Titian or Fragonard. Its exponents, such as Carlo Maria Mariani, Stefano di Stasio or Omar Galliani...
...critics are unimpressed. "Kitsch," some of them proclaim. The works, says Los Angeles Sculptor Richard Oginz, "strike a Norman Rockwell note." Indeed, Johnson is not about to knock Rodin off his pedestal, but his garden-variety American archetypes are a welcome-and welcoming-relief from "plunk art": find a plaza, acquire something made of huge welded beams, then plunk it down...