Title: The Artificial Kingdom
First published: 1998
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.
Subjects: art, attachment, collectibles, fantasy, figurines, imagination, keepsakes, kitsch, loss, mementos, memory, narrative, nostalgia, past, preservation, remembering, remembrance, sentiment, sentimentality, snowglobes, time, tourism, New York Times reviewed