In his essay the author tries to demonstrate to the reader the presence of kitsch in Terence Davies's film 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' (1988). He pays attention to the manner of imaging and use of popular songs on the soundtrack, and shows the dual approach to kitsch, that is typical of Davies. On the one hand, Davies rejects kitsch as a lie concealing domestic violence, and on the other hand rehabilitates the status of kitsch as a source of consolation for individuals and groups. The very dialectics of kitsch and truth is the subject matter of the text.
Pierre Bourdieu argues that in modern times, every aesthetic choice is a factor of social classification. His theory demonstrates that the judgment of taste is socially constructed and at the same time itself serves to establish social distance and hierarchy. In his analysis of kitsch, however, Tomaš Kulka posits that kitsch cannot come under the judgment of taste since, by its very definition, it is devoid of 'artistic value', which is the basis of any aesthetic judgment. From the structural point of view, argues Kulka, kitsch is not art at all. Since most miraculous images worshipped by Christians are quite different from those worshipped in museums, the applicability of the judgment of taste to so-called 'religious art' should clearly be called into question. The article quotes examples from field research to argue that the factors deemed essential for judging religious images by people who use them in their religious practice suggest that their evaluation should be based on concepts such as the Gadamerian indistinguishability or Michael Taussig's mimesis rather than on modern aesthetic values.
The subject of the article is Walter Benjamin's relation to animated cartoons with Mickey Mouse as the main protagonist. The author presents all the data connected with that problem in context of Benjamin's work. He emphasizes a revolutionary potential of those films and their influence on mass public. Then, he refers to laughter and destroying mechanisms and their liberating character. Benjamin's opinions are the background for author's considerations of the function of cinema, and are compared with the theories created by Fourier, de Sade or Marx. The analysis of Benjamin's opinion on the Mickey Mouse cartoons leads the author to the conclusion that on the one hand these films are kitsch, but, on the other, they are able to overcome it.
Tomáš Kulka notes in Kitsch and Art, that natural landscape cannot be called kitsch. The kitsch needs to be produced by a human being, he says. I agree with that. Experience-wise it is more complicated, though. Sometimes kitsch affects our experience of landscapes. It is not just that our overwhelming culture of images affects how we see nature, but that also sugared, sentimental and stereotypical kitsch images of nature, that we see in postcards and social media, affect our experience of e.g. sunsets and picturesque landscapes. We might desire to fight back, but at least we need to understand and to some extent accept our situation. The kitsch is in our experience even when there is no kitsch around, and our experiences of nature prove that.
In this essay I propose to consider 'kamp' style - on the example of chosen phenomena from the Czech culture - understood as a universal act of rebellion against the dictatorship of the so-called "good taste" and as a pressure of "Dionysians" on exclusive company of "aristocrats of the spirit". If the history of art is actually the history of changing taste, the 'kamp' current must be the perpetual and protean phenomenon. I propose to treat kamp as a type of avant-garde gesture in the broad sense, based on the trend of democratization, in many respects analogous to the phenomenon against which it acts (this is characteristic for each revolution and for her brother: carnival). Ostentation, mocking rejection of the canon and dismantling of the dominant determinants of taste become the methods of fight. Artistic kitsch, mannerism, parody or subversive practices are the most frequent expressions of kamp. In the essay I present the work of artists from Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic after World War II: photographer Jan Saudek, film duo Oldrich Lipský and Jiří Brdečka, playwright David Drábek and showman Daniel Nekonečný, considering it as a socially committed acts carried out in the framework of the "revolution of disgust".
In the first part of the article the authoress presents three theories of kitsch: Hermann Broch's, Abraham Moles' and Milan Kundera's. These form the theoretical basis for the analysis of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Double Life of Veronique', which forms the body of the second part of the article. In the analysis the authoress focuses on exaltation, the primacy of the aesthetics, on the so called religion of beauty and aesthetical lie. In the conclusion she argues that the analysis of the film allowed her to identify terms that belong to the dictionary of kitsch of the highest order. At the same time she maintains that the kitsch one is dealing with is not dangerous, as we are able to easily identify and formulate an insightful critique of the phenomenon. This means that our awareness of kitsch is higher than it was in the first half of the 20th century. Nowadays kitsch is no longer lived through. Rather it is used in different styles and art forms that offer both cheap thrills or exalted aesthetic experience such as in the case of Kieslowski's film.
This paper focuses on the symptom of a “sick body” that symbolizes the phenomenon of dissociation and dis-communication in the prose of contemporary Ukrainian young writers. Homelessness, rupture of generations, autism, and loser’s self-consciousness become the existential modes of being in the works of young writers O. Ushkalov, I. Karpa, M. Brynykh, and T. Maliarchuk. The paper analyses an extravagant character of self-representation of their heroes and shows how a particular morphology of body, such as annihilated body, monstrous body, fetish-body, is brought about. Another aspect of this paper concerns the melancholic sublimation that takes form of kitsch images of pop-culture and serves as a means to overcome a syndrome of total homelessness in the post-postmodern time.
Współczesne cmentarze przesycone są estetyką o cechach kultury popularnej. Szczególnie znajduje tu zastosowanie kicz jako „sztuka pocieszająca”. Praktyki organizowania wyglądu i estetyzacji grobu zależą od dostępności materiałów i akcesoriów, zasobności, a także kompetencji kulturowych i estetycznych. Obecnie nagrobki w większości przypadków powstają w rękach rzemieślników i są wytworem masowym. Uzasadnione z punktu widzenia estetyki pytanie: „czy cmentarze są ładne”, z punktu widzenia socjologii musi zostać przekształcone w pytania: dla kogo są ładne, jakie funkcje pełni taka a nie inna estetyka, jakie są jej związki z innymi zjawiskami kultury, z cechami społeczeństwa? Dziś ta specyficzna estetyka sprawia wrażenie zastygłej i kulturowo wyizolowanej, nie tylko ze względu na jej funkcje rytualne, łagodzące i dystansujące wobec grozy śmierci, ale także dlatego, że kultura cmentarzy i kultura późnej nowoczesności mówią różnymi językami.
EN
Contemporary cemeteries are characterized by popular culture aesthetics. Particularly, kitsch is used as ‘comforting art’. Practices of organizing the appearance and aestheticization of a tomb depend on the availability of materials and accessories, affluence level, as well as cultural and aesthetic competence. Nowadays tombstones in most cases are made by craftsmen and are mass-produced. From the point of view of sociology, the question whether cemeteries are pretty, wellfounded on the grounds of aesthetics, should be replaced by the following questions: who are they pretty for?, what functions does a given aesthetics fulfil?, what is the relevance of other cultural phenomena and features of a society to it? Nowadays, this specific aesthetics gives the impression of being petrified and culturally isolated, not only because of its ritual and alleviating functions or the function of repressing death anxiety, but also insomuch as the culture of cemetery and the late modernity culture speak different languages.
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