Doyle Saylor says:

Jeesh, never heard of him, and come to find out he is ‘popular’. Some of his paintings are extremely racist. Feh.

Kitsch was a bit of thing in the U.S. during the last 20 years of the twentieth century. Supposed to be democratic. The champions of it were such a bunch of rascals. Except the Warhol people who were in a class of their own. I remember one of Warhol’s movies about the ‘Empire State’ building, two projectors, eight hours of footage side by side. That inspired my thinking about ‘realism’. That wasn’t kitsch, it was an affront about movie watching. Warhol claimed to like boring things, and that was the biggest bore to watch.

After Warhol was shot he veered away from the ‘demi-monde’ of homosexual marginalization. Transferring from the dregs to the glamour world of fashion was no big stretch for Warhol because of his already fashionable image.

Kitsch often has a bit of ‘realism’ about it. Abstraction, modernism, a bit of upper class ‘polish’. Realism being a virtue of the lower classes, and polish the sure sign of hired help doing their requisite assigned task.
thanks,
Doyle

Doyle Saylor says:

Hi Ravi,
Tried to go to the site yesterday to dredge up some titles, but it was down. This morning I collected some poster titles that illustrate my point. Any one of these four is clearly racist images: Boy With The Melon, Coon, Melon Time, Ten Commandments: 6: Thou Shalt Not Kill

To clarify, Coon is an extremely derogatory name for African persons in the U.S. Further the image itself is of minstrel figure which was a deliberate stereotype to diminish Black people in the U.S. who had just emerged from slavery. I’m sure South African whites relished similar views of Africans.

The two images of watermelon eating children is standard ‘darky’ humor. You know how those ‘darkys’ love their melon. The ten commandments figures are all white except for the Black person who is the murderer. The other images of Africans are ethnically placing them in ‘native’ clothes as if they weren’t members of the South African Culture. And so on.

Which explains why I haven’t seen his work in the U.S., it’s so blatently up front with Jim Crow images no one could sell them publically without a lot of hoop and holler driving business away. Of course an underground white racist culture can still get the goods ‘quietly’.

Which brings me back to kitsch. A lot kitsch culture is ‘blithe’. Unaware, not clued in. Aren’t we all? I think ‘ignorance’ is related to how mass communications work. But is an art topic also. A lot of African Americans have a sideways appreciation of the Jim Crow imagery like Amos and Andy. Can see poigancy in the mask that people wore in an era where only inhuman stereotypes were allowed in the public.

High art in the U.S. used to be hostile to Kitsch just because of the insensitivity and pandering to mass stereotypes destroyed the more in depth complexity ‘serious’ artists displayed. Since that just covered up similar ideas in ‘serious’ artists with a patina of ‘acceptable’ opinion, Kitsch came to symbolize the ‘ironic’ up front code of the culture that ‘high art’ mystified.

I’m of the opinion that mass media explored very large scale ‘universal’ themes in the culture that negates the art world embrace of Kitsch. Kitsch was as this examples shows some little individual who could evoke a ‘sentimental’ response in their images. That sort of small scale producer production contradicts how mass marketing must work. The mass market can’t tolerate such differences as ethnic divides if that impedes profits. So the big mass media creates anti-Kitsch values in the culture. In other words mass media portrayal of any ethnic group tends toward a more and more generalized image of anyone ‘absorbed’ into the mass culture. An individual artist can’t hope to find subjects that continue to illustrate say ‘coon’ when no black person would act that way anymore. Nor would a white wearing black face be acceptable in that way either. Thus erasing the market value of the sentimentally created Kitsch.
Doyle