31 Quotes About Kitsch

She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Kitsch is not seeing something for what it is, but what you think it should be.

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.

Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists

But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.

You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it.

Dünya tümel bir kiç yapıtına dönüşürken [Gesamtkitschwerk], geçmiş daha şimdi vuku bulmuş kadar yakınımıza gelmektedir ve 1453'te fethedilen İstanbul bile beş yüz altmış yıldır sanki bir türlü fethedilemiyormuş gibi gâvur gâvur bakmaktadır.

In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.