Thursday, June 27, 2013

When does it become "Kitsch"?

When I first took this photo at as I remember what was an expensive store for women's bags etc. I remembered being both fascinated and somewhat repelled by these objects..

Visually, you know, it is like the temptation to eat too much wedding cake...fun now but what about the after effects ( I had the same experience wandering around an old section of Prague once, someone told me it was where Kafka's family had lived, the architecture was..well, ornate is putting it mildly...gave me the same sensation after a while that I had had enough of it pretty soon...

I suppose the best single example of a real "kitsch" item was way back when the Pope visited Canada and some local store sold a version of "soap on a rope" (to hang around your neck so you would not drop it in the shower)--but with the Pope's  face carved on the soap...( someone immediately called it "Pope on a rope" of course)

A good example of  a store I have not viewed in ages was this place called A La Vielle Russie not far from the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue ( i would have to google and make sure it is still there, that expression about things changing "in a New York minute" is so, so true)...

I think they once had an exhibit of some of those Faberge Eggs in their window...

Some of this work seemed rather over the top to me, and I wondered if it we were not dealing in a category of --what-- "High Kitsch"?

  I know one person who hated anything too decorative (unless he chose it himself of course) or what could be called kitsch was Frank Lloyd Wright...he even wanted to tell some people where their furniture  he supervised should go, precisely, in the houses he designed for them...

I can imagine the temper tantrum Wright would throw if he visited one of his clients in one of "his" houses and found they had something like that fancy horse prominently on view...

Or, he might have just said nothing and burned with disapproval and anger...

I think something like the horse would be fun to have  in an apartment in a building designed by Mies van der Rohe or Corbusier...

To say nothing of some rather ornate religious art, too...or a great antique suit of armor ( that would have yanked Wright's chain for sure, he hated anything in architecture or his houses that could anyway hark back to a feudal past...signifying, to him, feudal social values. But he always wanted to be Lord of the Manor himself, didn't he?

I leave it to you how you define "kitsch"....I wish I had a funny line to go out on here but I never was much of a "gag" writer, I tried doing it sometimes for a school show we did in high school and found it was not one of my skills--while  situational comic ideas often came to me.

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