Word: kitsched
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Perhaps other Russian painters, unknown to the West, are busy boring and clicking like so many deathwatch beetles within the facade of idealist kitsch known as Soviet socialist realism. But it is hard to see how they could ruin it more thoroughly. K & M's paintings are not merely banal, but excruciatingly so, oily and inert, varnished so heavily that three-quarters of the surface is glare; the eye gropes for the cliches that lie embedded in them. The accretion becomes a kind of conceptual art, holding everything in quotation marks...
Most 1981 design was not bad. It was awful. But the few new urban places, buildings, industrial products and graphics that were good, were very, very good. The awfulness was not just a matter of bad taste. A little kitsch in dull surroundings can be as endearing as a whiff of horse manure in the city. The dismaying pollution of the cityscape, like that of the language, stems from illiterate and, worse, semiliterate pretentiousness...
...kitsch of the season is Dime-Store Days (Penguin; 128 pages; $12.95) by Lester Glassner and Brownie Harris. Lovingly assembled by a five-and-ten freak and movie junkie, this compendium of glittering gimcracks from the '30s and '40s provides a deep wallow in nostalgia. Among the glories of Woolworthlessness are cutouts of Carmen Miranda with the plaster-banana wall plaques she inspired, a Charlie McCarthy paper doll "with movable mouth," and a lurid World War II poster of a starlet straddling a bomb inscribed TOKYO EXPRESS...
...rejected entries include such kitsch as a house-high steel helmet and a number of handsomely styled columns, pylons, tablets and structures that belong at a world's fair or amusement park. Oth er designs accommodate the thousands of names on various layouts of slabs, blocks and other geometric stones and look depressingly like constructivist graveyards...
Travelers pulling off I-90 at the Wall exit (the one with the 80-ft. dinosaur next to the Highway) thread through station wagons and campers jamming Main Street. Once inside Wall Drug, road-weary visitors are faced with a bewildering pastiche of class and kitsch. The store sells $200 Tony Lama boots-as well as $2.19 models of Mount Rushmore and corncob toilet paper for $1.19. Left-handed calf ropers can buy lariats twisted especially for southpaws. The Rock Hound Shop offers fossils and crystals. Campers buy heavy iron skillets, lightweight canteens and water-purifying tablets; ranchers buy lousefly...