Word: kitsched
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...Music Hall's problem is, of course, economic. The stage show is perhaps the best entertainment bargain in town; for as little as $2, a patron has been able to see low-kitsch ballet, precision numbers by the Rockettes, a magic show, an occasional elephant, horses and giant fountain displays. While Rockefeller Center, which owns the theater, is now giving it a $1,000,000 annual subsidy, the money does not make up for a marked drop in attendance over the last two decades. In its peak years in the '40s, the Music Hall attracted 12 million visitors...
...mythological vacuum of the modern world. The presumption is that these fragments are awaiting a supersign that will unify them into some sort of new mythic order. When this in fact occurs in Tournier's book, the effect is one not of artistic revelation but of melodramatic kitsch: a young Auschwitz refugee turns into a Star of David; the star, in turn, spins off to the heavens as a more generalized mandala symbolizing a harmonious universe...
...kitsch didn't really hit the fan until the scene was set for Charles Chaplin's honorary Oscar. Daniel Taradash, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Hollywood lefty of decent standing, introduced the world's greatest film comic and actor--and some would say director--as a man who always strove to prove that "man's humanity to man is far greater than his inhumanity to man." Then, after a film clip melange predictably slapped together by Peter boy-do-I-know-films Bogdanovich. Chaplin emerged from the same stage cockpit as the first...
...gold finial of a stylized griffin's head, to new figurines that are apparently the Russian equivalent of those excruciating ashtrays one is offered in Texas airports. Mother Russia has dumped the contents of her apron into the Corcoran, and the result is a heterogeneous pile of modern kitsch, late czarist elegance and early barbaric splendor, mingled with the beautifully wrought and unpretentious products of pre-Revolutionary folk artists. The less said about official post-Revolutionary folk art the better: it is characterized (except for some fine Baltic textiles) by an earnest garishness -in short, it is no better...
...grand foyer, with its six-story mirrors, marble, chandeliers and inevitable red carpet, strives to be timeless but achieves only the crushing placelessness of an international air terminal. At the same time, Stone's attempted monumentality is often undone-even on its own terms-by a sense of kitsch. Thus (to take only one example) the walls of the opera house are padded with red material which-as in leathery club bars-is buttoned in panels with rows of brass tacks. But real tacks would be lost in so big a space. The solution? Fake brass tack heads, Oldenburg...