Abstract
For a term that gathers together, among other objects, flying ducks, gnomes and fluffy pandas, kitsch inspires extreme reactions of fear and loathing, contempt and mockery. Might the subject matter of this book draw the same reaction? Will it provoke hostility from an academic ‘elite’, branding kitsch as an unworthy pursuit of the banal, frivolous and fake? If indeed this is the case, it is their loss and reflective of personal prejudices. For this misplaced judgement underlines one of the key theoretical themes of this wonderful study – that kitsch is about a politics of aesthetics, of good and bad taste, that draws a fundamental opposition between the ‘poor’ purveyors of kitsch who need rescuing by the powerful avant-garde. Demolishing this opposition in order to identify the positioning activity in the moment of aesthetic judgement, this is a brilliant analysis of the structure of the sensible world and of communities of sense, which explores the ideology of kitsch as a category rather than assuming a uniquely kitsch aesthetic.
From the television series Love Boat, Liberace, plastic snowglobes, Barry Manilow and Teddy bears, kitsch has a vital ingredient that makes some livid and some think of it as cool. The authors herd together a collection of kitsch objects, but not, they suggest, with the objective of providing an exhaustive list of ‘good’ kitsch, ‘bad’ kitsch, ‘camp’ kitsch or ‘cool’ kitsch. Rather, their objective is not to curate kitsch but to identify the positioning activity, the actions and not the projections or abstractions, in the moment of aesthetic judgement and the act of taste. To quote Mandy Merck, the authors desire to see sparkles and spangles from a different angle (p. 33). They want to reframe possessions and, rejecting a cue from Mitchell’s study on dinosaurs (the worst type of kitsch), adopt the perspective of neither dinophile nor dinoscientist but of approaching objects as sources of value to understand, not smash (p. 35).
The chapter on ‘cool’ kitsch illustrates the delicate process that the authors embark upon to tease out this almost ungraspable value. Holliday and Potts expose the capital interests and inner workings at play in the construction of ‘cool’ kitsch (p. 160). They look at the performance of ‘cool’ such as played out by the characters in the movie Pulp Fiction. They locate in the ‘cool doing kitsch’ (p. 155) a mechanism of sanctification as a select and restricted audience is invited to participate in the construction of cool. Time Out in New York, for example, provides listings of what is cool, and yet ‘the truly hip is off the radar’ (p. 166). Indeed, Holliday and Potts illustrate how cool is anything but part of a democratized landscape of objects. Instead, ‘cool’ kitsch is a restricted currency among a maze of different identities, including that of class. It is a certain manufactured knowingness where the social position and superior knowledge of the person who is doing the naming is paramount (p. 177).
In an age of so-called disaster capitalism and panic culture, the chapter on ‘disaster’ kitsch is stunning vis-à-vis its ability to draw gasps of amazement as it lists the commoditization of recent disasters – the 9/11 snowglobe, the FDNY bear. Looking at the problem of the image and representation, it begins with Oprah visiting Auschwitz. Here, the authors turn our incredulity at this episode back on ourselves. Kitsch, they argue, comes to denote the offensiveness of Oprah’s project. In particular, ‘kitschification’ comes to partition the disaster from the real and becomes the ‘absolute crime’ – a fatal form of aestheticization embodied in disaster kitsch (p. 197). Holliday and Potts attempt to dissect what exactly the offence is caused by kitsch at this point. ‘Disaster’ kitsch, they reveal, is not a sign of its own tragedy but an operation that problematizes the image and representation and mass culture, and the spectacle that imagines and binds an affronted audience and community (p. 230).
So, examining ‘cool’ kitsch and ‘disaster’ kitsch, is it tempting to think that kitsch has endless disruptive political possibilities? The authors suggest that kitsch is no more a regressive escape from the judgements of ‘good’ taste made by Elle Deco or the endless lists that appear in broadsheets of the ‘hippest’ restaurants and most ‘edgy’ bars than ‘cool’ kitsch is watching Skippy the Bush Kangaroo with the sound turned down, as Germaine Greer allegedly does (p. 241). Kitsch is about a hierarchical social system of good and bad taste that may well now be lucrative but has done little to bring about a taste(less) democracy.