On Kitsch, Odd Nerdrum

"Kitsch Serves Life" by Odd Nerdrum

8 "The valley in front of us lay bathing in the light from a magnificent sunset.
For a moment we were enthralled by the sight. Then he said: 'It is beautiful,
but remember never to paint anything like this is if you become an artist,
then you will not be accepted at the Autumn Exhibition.'"

10 "From [modernism] on, art received its justification for existence form the
rebellion against tradiition, history and power... Today, at the end of the
century, we see the paradoxical result: Modernism itself has become a
tradition which has conquered the entire western world."

10 "In the same way christiannity demonized its competitors, so too did
Modernism. And the ruler of Modernism's hell was christened 'Kitsch' --
signifying the antithesis of modern art. Kitsch became the unified concept for
al that wasnt intellectual and new..."

11 Zorn, Edvard Munch, Kallela, Repin, Sibelius were all artists accused of kitsch.
Most either gave up their craft or switched to modernism

11 "The task of kitsch is to create a seriousness in life, at its best so sublie it will
bring the laughter to a quiet. Kitsch serves life and therefore seks the
individual, in contradiction to art's irony and dispassion."

11 Kitsch appeals to vulnerability, not rationality

"Kitsch -- heart and soul, blood and guts" by Sindre Mekjan

14 "'Kitsch' is traditionally used to describe garish, vulgarized objects, or cheap,
mass-produced paintings with simple, inane motifs... Is there any point today,
in distinguishing between highbrow and lowbrow, kitsch and art? Motifs
from commonplace culture have been used by leading artists since at least
the 1950s"

14 Duality of kitsch on a higher level: melodrama, complex themes, but
beautifully executed

15 Broch argues that kitsch merely expresses beauty in a garishly direct way,
rather than the roundabout way of true art. Nerdrum argues that kitsch is the
horrifying painted in such a way that it is beautiful, made to e stirringly
beautiful no matter what

* So basically what I'm getting is that modernism recasts all narrative and
religious artworks that preceeded it as kitsch
16 "When they approach a work of art, their standards tell them the work
should be new... there should be no tears or emotions. It should be discrete
and reserved. We are taught to keep an ironic distance"

19 "Kitsch is not interested in crating a new infrastructure within society. It is
the disobedient human's quest for happiness"

20 On Jeff Koons, "Nooo, that's not kitsch. Far from it. That's camp. With camp,
the artist laughs first and then cues the public to laugh. Kitsch is dead
serious. A moose by a clear lake. Creating great kitsch is something
extraordinary. It demands a great deal."

"Kitsch: the Superstructure of Sensuality"

27 "Kitsch is the intimate space, our selves, our love and our congeniality, our
yearnings and our hopes, and our tears, joys and passion. kitsch comes from
the creative person's private space, and speaks to other private spaces.
Kitsch deals therefore with giving intimacy dignity. This is the reason the
kitschperson does not long for official innovation. On the conrary, he or she
year for a human state of emotion where the same thing repeats itself in
different clothes. Kitsch will not therefore crate a better wor.d, or a new
realm, for humankind. itsch will lighten the existence of the individua. kitsch
does not flee away from the human condition, it runs into it."

* Art, on the other hand, is part of a community, an establishment.

31 In the same way there are different levels of art, (since the elimination of
quality criterias, there are in reality only two levels of art; art and famous
art,) there are also levels in kitsch. Levels from bad kitsch, harmelss kitsch
and transcendental kitsch which stop laughter. The goal [of kitsch] is to
reach this highest expression, where vulnerability goes beyond irony, a
presence beyond abstraction.

40 "If it is true that we live in a postmodern era, why then were the figurative
art galleries forced to exhibit their works at the very back of the hall in 1998,
and why were they refused participation in 1999??

42 Tomas Kulka's experiment where a painting of a sunset was deemed more
'kitchy' than a photograph of a sunset-- the mechanical medium reduces
while the hand induces a sense of kitsch

42 "In the German magazine, Art, this was mae clear: skill as a quality is a
bourgeois method of judging art.

* Nerdrum sttes that kitsch is commonly misunderstood to be mass-produced
items, poorly made. Why does he exclude this definition, and who is he to
say?

42 According to Broch and Greenberg, kitsch is a threat to serious artisitic
expression, "reactionary and without moral responsibility for the
development of art."

43 By 'kitsch,' one refers to things that have been bought in the understanding
that they are either esthetically valuable as home decor, or because one
actually believes that they are art. In both cases, these products are
purchased in order to beautify one's life." (Calinescu)

43 Kulka: the goal lies in the emotion to be achieved, not the image itself. Kitsch
is digested emotion.

The Psychology of Visual Art

Perceiving Pictures
69 It is impossible to determine absolute scale from a two-dimensional image
because one's eyes do not have to shift planes or distances when looking at
objects within the picture plane. Only absolute scale is possible.

69 Viewing a picture from any angle but straight-on results in visual distortion
(consider the box-in-a-frame example)

72 The limitations of depth perception at a distance cause us to see objects
beyond about 300 meters away as quite flat

73 It is thought that, in the same way human beings learn to read by associating
pictograms with sounds or concepts, we may learn to read images in a
specific way, differently from the way we read real scenes. We interpret the
visual information differently

--Scottish missionaries in Africa during the 1800s reported that the
individuals they had worked with were unable to recognize the content of
pictures, leading to the idea that pictorial competence is culturally
transmitted (Deregowski)

--Hudson study of pictorial competence involving line drawings which found
that the ability to read pictures was related to formal education

* Basically saying that if you don't develop pictorial competence according to
Western conventions of pictures, based on visual reproduction of reality,
then you don't get pictures. This is probably why the above study was widely
attacked for bias. Also 30% of educated Scots who tried the test also bombed
it

--Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks' infant test in which they kept their
child from exposure to pictorial representations until 19 months, at which
point the child's desire to seek out pictures was so strong they gave up. The
child read both realistic images and line drawings, connecting them to the
objects they depicted, no problemo

--other studies with children (as well as the tribal anecdote) suggest that
education is not necessary to read pictures, but perhaps is necessary to
distinguish pictures from actual objects

78 Although research suggests that pictures are read using the same physical
and psychoogical techniques as real scenes, spacial inconsistencies in
pictures, such as impossibilities of shadow and perspective, can often and
easily be overlooked by the eye.

--This is thought to be a result of the eye's focusing. As the eye jumps from
one part of the image to another, unable to focus on more than one small spot
at a time, it is difficult to 'remember' spacial information between jumps.

--The viewer can never retain a single visual impression of the whole scene.
An image unfolds over careful, serial inspection of small parts. Because these
inconsistencies don't exist in natural sight, the brain is not on the lookout for
them

83 "Eye movements are an essential element of human vision, driven by the
need to direct objects of interest onto the acute foveal region of the retina.

--when looking at a picture, the eye moves in order of what is thinks it needs
to seek out in order to make sense of the image. However, most viewers do
not have a motivation when looking at artwork. So what path do the eyes
take?

Eyes move to:
--area of highest local contrast (Itti and Koch)
--highest density of features (Itti and Koch)
--central framed image, regardless of content (Mannan et al
--Faces (Cerf et al)

89 The brain responds the same way to observing motion as it does to observing
images containing implied motion.

114 Color is differentiated in the brain according to a blue-yellow axis, red-green
axis, and luminance
125 "Objectivist Theory" of beauty: beauty is an inherent property of an object.
Signifiers such as symmetry and proportion
Plato, Kant
"Subjectivist Theory: eye of the beholder
"Interactionist Theory": beauty emeres from an interaction of these two.
Consistent patterns in relating to an object result in perception of beauty

"Beauty is in the processing experiences of the beholder" Reber, et al
In other words, "beauty judgments are determined jointly by objective
stimulus properties and the perceiver's cognitive and emotional processes"

129 Opinions of what is beautiful is art are surprisingly similar across the board--
a questionnaire administered to thousands of participants from four
continents found that the overwhelming majority preferred outdoor, natural
scenes (Komar and Melanid)

--greater preference for open spaces (ie moutains instead of forest), presense
of people and animals, and water

130 Looking at a 'beautiful' pictures activates the same mental reward system as
food, water, and sexual stimulation. (McClure)

*** What does this mean for the disinterested, academic value ascribes to
some works of art, particularly when considering modernism?

--No evidence of different brain patterns when a participant looks at art
objects versus other objects. In other words, they are mentally appraised in
the same way.
"The aesthetic appraisal of art is mediated by the same brain processes that
serve aesthetic appraisal of objects that have survival value.

131 Ratings of 300 paintings were found to be quite similarly sorted into
categories of "beautiful" "neutral" or "ugly" (Kawabata and Zeki)

Greater preference expressed for images that generated more activity in the
ventral striatum.

*** I'm assuming here that most of these studies are of people with little to
no art education, otherwise preferences would be skewed. What has become
beautiful to the 'art world' and why?

132 Why is visual pleasure part of the instinctive reward system at all? Is it
related to surviving?

Many studies argue that preferred landscapes are those that appear to afford
the most food, shelter, and safety. But, this does not really speak to beauty so
much as it speaks to content.

141 Mystery is cited as one of the most compelling elements of an image.
Occluded elements encourage exploration. This is thought to be exciting to
animals that forage for food. Not totally sold.

143 Vision is incredibly taxing on the human brain. When at rest, brain takes up
about 20% of the body's energy. Vision alone uses about 5% of the whole
body's energy. Glucose consumption in the visual cortex is reduced 50%
when a person closes their eyes.

--It's possible that selection pressure favored individuals with more energy-
efficient visual processing systems. This includes filling in recurring images,
such as the repetitive pattern of ever smaller branches on trees

150 Spectral scope vs Fractal dimension

On Kitsch, Nostalgia, and Nineties Femininity
by Stephanie Brown

1 "In a postmodern, post-Warholian art world, the slippage betwen so-called
'high' art and the more 'degraded' forms of mass and popular culture would
seem to have obviated the need for discussion of such 'archaic' ideas as the
'aura' of Walter Benjamin's authentic art object."

"nostalgia both evokes a desire for, and is evoked by the presence of, kitsch
objects"

3 "Taste in the United Sates has historically been very closely linked to a
willingness to embrace European cultural exports..."

4 "Kitsch is always mass produced"
--This is in stark contrast to Odd Nerdrum's definition of kitsch

"Kitsch objects are also 'beautified,' even, or perhaps especially, when such
beautifuication is actually entirely unnecessary to the item's purported
purpose or function."

"...kitsch objects have in common a desire to evoke appreciation through
their ornamentation for someting necessarily extrinsic to them"
-- example of a bar of soap from graceland

5 "Adorno's reading of kitsch is that it is a kind of 'parody of catharsis,' in
which pseudo-art gives passive, working-class cultural consumer a
'diversion' which is a parody of true aesthetic experience"

"Above all, kitsch is designed to sell."

6 "...one way to differentiate kitsch from 'art' is to note the way that kitscho
foregrounds its 'produced-ness' while traditional forms of 'gigh art' attempt
to conceal it

"The idea here seems to be that kitsch is guilty of degrading 'art'by bringing
it down to the level of the veryday object or commodity.

--inference that domestication is effectively kitschification

"Feminine beauty is domesticated in the very act of its being created; placed
on the body of a real woman, whatever 'art' might inhere in some idealized
conception of female beauty is automatically kitschified..."