Title: Kitsch
Subtitle: The World of Bad Taste
First published: 1969
Description: Gillo Dorfles offers a veritable "catalogue raisonne of reigning bad taste" in the visual arts. His purpose is not simply to entertain but rather to demonstrate the contagious and corrosive nature of a phenomenon that threatens to debilitate the creative energies of the very society that spawned it. He and the other contributors examine the use of kitsch in politics, religion, advertising, film, architecture and design, "pornokitsch," and the modern trappings that surround birth, family life and death. To document the vulgar and the sentimental, the unintentionally hilarious and the simply hideous is an undertaking that will, inevitably, include something to offend everyone.
Subjects: architecture, art, camp, bio-pics, design, fine art, high art, avant-garde, Christianity, cinema, collectibles, death, figurines, film, kitsch, kitsch attitude, kitsch-man, Kitsch-Mensch, literature, marriage, modern art, modernism, modernity, monuments, monumental art, movies, myth, nature, novels, painting, pop, popular culture, porn, pornography, public art, religion, romanticism, sculpture, sentimentality, sex, styling, tourism, Arts, Aesthetics, Tackiness, 02.99 science and culture in general: other, 20.07 art criticism, art review, Estetica (Arte), Modern Arts
People: John McHale, Karl Pawek, Ludwig Giesz, Lotte H. Eisner, Ugo Volli, Vittorio Gregotti, Aleksa Celebonovic, Hermann Broch, Clement Greenberg
LC classification: NX210 .D6 1969b, BH301.K5 D67 1990, NX210 .D6