On Kitsch, Its Seductions, and the Con of Manufactured Depth.
There is a balloon dog the size of a small car, forged in mirror-polished stainless steel, reflecting the crowd that gathered to admire it. It costs somewhere north of $50 million. The crowd, educated, sophisticated, aware loves it without embarrassment, which is precisely what its maker intended. Jeff Koons has never hidden what he is doing. The problem is that much of the art world has pretended, for decades now, that what he is doing is something else entirely.
This is the central deception of contemporary kitsch: not that it is pleasurable, but that pleasure has been dressed in the borrowed clothes of criticality and passed off as intellectual seriousness. To understand why this matters, we first need to understand what kitsch actually is…
#artmagazine #artists #contemporaryartmagazine #contemporaryart #kitsch
Go to article -> https://t.co/92dlY2c8dw