The artificial kingdom
Subtitle: a treasury of the kitsch experience
By: Celeste Olalquiaga.
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 321
Subjects: Kitsch.
Description: The Artificial Kingdom is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste," or a cheap imitation of art. Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies.

Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
"With remarkable objects of art and nature, extraordinary events, eccentric biography and originsl theory plus many wonderful illustrations selected by the author."