We are prone to saying “to each his own”.
Sorry. Some things are always stupid, shallow, and indicative of people stuck at age 7. If you favor the tasteless, you’re tasteless.
That is, sadly, most of us.
True culture takes a beating every time a new, more naive class enters the marketplace. It used to be that going to college creamed your brain enough that you knew that pink bathrooms and inspirational bumper stickers were somehow what they really are, which is bad. And indicative of really bad taste that made you a moron.
Tomas Kulka, in his Penn State Press book, says that kitsch is any art, music, architecture, or literature – think adult Harry Potter enthusiasts – that emits big emotions (puppies, children, barns, sunsets, waterfalls), easily identifiable subjects (like the prior list), and DOES NOT ENRICH the viewer on any level.
What does this do for you?
What does this say about you?
Kitsch can be old women and men trying to suspend the aging process by applying Scott’s Turf Builder. It can be those metal civic buildings built solely at the lowest possible cost. It can be the color pink. It is anything superficial and easy. Way too easy.
Leave out irony, though. Irony can be high art. Sticking a tasteless plastic pink flamingo out front can be high art if done to confuse your neighbors or chase away gophers. Sticking a pink flamingo out front, if done by Andy Warhol, is an artistic statement of high calibre.
Leave out Susan Sontag’s and Walter Benjamin’s photography. (By the way, if you don’t know these people, you haven’t been to college, you have been to a glorified trade school.) Photography can be high art, just not as most people use it, which is to record every banal daily event, every ingestion, every defecation.
And film can be camp. Campy. The mid-’70’s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, was seen by the masses as a straight horror show. Martin Mull’s Fernwood 2Nite/America 2Nite was seen by some as a “real” talk show. Actually, Kolchak was campy (Monster of the Week!”) and Mull – a great artist, btw – castrated Johnny Carson in broad daylight.
If you want to grow up before you die, buy and read, even if it gives you a cerebral vascular accident, a Philosophy 101 textbook. Or the Bible. Or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.
It may hurt. That means it’s worthwhile.
This isn’t worthwhile:
People now don’t go to college to be schooled in the liberal arts. They go to college to get trained in highly specialized, inane careers. Those careers are stifling.
Thus stifled, those careerists need to recover with trips to Spain, political activism, music from their childhoods, being waited upon like kings and queens in restaurants where the workers get by with the help of marijuana and spitting in the soup, getting massages, binge watching TV, whatever.
And they say, “To each their own!” in defense of their wasted lives. They get away with it because we’ve all been trained since birth that we’re entitled, ENTITLED, to do, have, be, AND LIKE whatever we want. And that our tastes and educational level is on par with Leonard Bernstein.
We’ve been told this lie by the men and women of capitalism who hope to sell us something on the back of their keeping us little narcissistic boys and girls who have to be told by “experts” to stay in our rooms and, as Martin Mull sang in one of his songs, “think the things we thought when we were three.”
Fuck it, most people are a lethal threat to those who aspire to making real meaning. And to having real happiness.
Those who aspire to greatness are part of a remnant. A small and shrinking population of serious people doing and thinking serious things. For the sake of a deep, deep, orgasmic enjoyment.
And having more fun in doing so than any kitsch-dweller can imagine!
