Kitsch is Odd Nerdrum's luxuriously produced apologia for the enduring relevance of the old master style. Containing writings and interviews by and with Nerdrum alongside hefty plate sections of both Nerdrum's own paintings and those by painters he sees as exemplars of a certain kind of figurative art, it is a bold attack on the foundations of modernism. In Nerdrum's view, what we call "kitsch" art is a consequence of modernism's "make it new" ethic. For Nerdrum, this insistence on novelty has permeated the thinking of institutions, critics, artists and the public, and has effectively suppressed what Nerdrum most values in a work of art: sentimentality, passion, pathos and the self-evident skill and emotion of sheer craft. By this latter value in particular, the kitsch painter is able to work according to knowable standards that painting prior to modernism has established--standards that are "more than art," for, as Nerdrum puts it, "the kitsch painter commits himself to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise." Kitsch is a manifesto that recruits figurative painters both old and new, such as William Dyce, Paul Fenniak, Sampo Kaikkonen, Isaac Levitan, Osiris Rain, Ilya Repin, Giovanni Segantini, Valentin Serov, George Tooker, George Frederick Watts and Anders Zorn, and situates their work alongside more than 70 of Nerdrum's recent paintings. Alongside essays, poems and plays by the artist, Kitsch contains an extended dialogue on the topic between Nerdrum and Maria Kreyn.

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.

Kitsch has long been viewed as fine art's poor relation, aping its form while failing utterly to achieve its depth of meaning. In "On Kitsch" Odd Nerdrum and others discuss the meaning and value of kitsch in today's world, and its relationship to art. For the first time in this volume, English-speaking fans have the chance to read the writings of Odd Nerdrum, Norway's most famous contemporary artist, or kitch painter, as he would refer to himself. This printing of a variety of writings by Nerdrum and others includes speeches, essays, and humorous pieces such as "The Kitch Questionnaire," and "Kitch Aphorisms." This book is an opportunity to discover the thought process of one of the world's most unique and compelling artists.

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

A new view of Fontana showing how the artist combined modernist aesthetics with outmoded forms of kitsch. In 1961, a solo exhibition by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana met with a scathing critical response from New York art critics. Fontana (1899–1968), well known in Europe for his series of slashed monochrome paintings, offered New York ten canvases slashed and punctured, thickly painted in luridly brilliant hues and embellished with chunks of colored glass. One critic described the work as “halfway between constructivism and costume jewelry,” unwittingly putting his finger on the contradiction at the heart of these paintings and much of Fontana's work: the cut canvases suggest avant-garde iconoclasm, but the glittery ornamentation evokes outmoded forms of kitsch. In Lucio Fontana, Anthony White examines a selection of the artist's work from the 1930s to the 1960s, arguing that Fontana attacked the idealism of twentieth-century art by marrying modernist aesthetics to industrialized mass culture, and attacked modernism's purity in a way that anticipated both pop art and postmodernism. Fontana painted expressionist and abstract sculptures in the pinks and golds of mass-produced knick-knacks, saturated architectural installations with fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light, and encrusted candy-colored monochrome canvases with glitter. In doing so, White argues, he challenged Clement Greenberg's dictum that avant-garde and kitsch are diametrically opposed. Relating Fontana's art to the political and social context in which he worked, White shows how Fontana used the materials and techniques of mass culture to comment on the fate of the avant-garde under Italian fascism and the postwar “economic miracle.” At a time when Fontana's work is commanding record prices, this new interpretation of the work assures that it has unprecedented critical relevance.

"Clement Greenberg is, internationally, the best-known American art critic popularly considered to be the man who put American vanguard painting and sculpture on the world map. . . . An important book for everyone interested in modern painting and sculpture."—The New York Times