Kitsch – Retro – Taste

Hi guys –

This is one of my final stuff for my essay ;

In my opinion, the whole point of retro and kitsch, it is a matter of taste. Fundamental to any understanding of kitsch and retro is the idea of taste. What is taste? “Taste, of course, is the faculty we posses for enjoying and discerning beauty. Like any exercise of judgement, decisions as to what is tasteful and what is not are based upon an amalgam of influences from different times and different places.’ Page 6 – kitsch in sync.

The same applies to retro. What I already said about retro; it can be a longing to an another decade, and that is a matter of taste. Retro seems, like kitsch, to be a taste-related issue too.

(…)

It is hard to make a difference between kitsch and retro. Is retro the cool cousin of kitsch or is kitsch the jovial cousin of retro? It is a matter of taste, it is about how you can look to things with a lens. Kitsch and retro may be lenses which through their difference allow us to see how we are – by looking askance. It is also how the audience watch the films. People influence each other about taste.

(…)

If over a number of years a film has become associated with kitsch or fallen into the category of kitsch – and this has become the case because this is widely accepted – then perhaps it has accrued a range of connotations over that time as it has become strongly associated with a set of values. Maybe an exaggerated set of values.

aboids says:

12/04/2012 at 3:53 pm

Interesting topic! I think in your previous post you asked us about the differences and I made some points there so won’t repeat myself here! Taste, like your quote says, is personal distinction of someone’s knowledge, background, cultural upbringing, and peer/ social influence all rolled into one concoction!

Can I just ask, what it your research question? If there was an argument we could reference to, perhaps we could make a few more suggestions if you needed them?

ChristianC says:

15/04/2012 at 10:10 am

Hi Marie,

You probably are aware of this anyway but there’s a whole pile of good stuff in the taste text pdf we were given re underpinning taste: of interest in particular might be the bits about Bourdieu and difference and systems of difference, and Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory book which is about the creation and destruction of value and the socially determined nature of value (it is socially malleable) – and the movement of objects/products (or cultural artefacts I suppose) through different statuses of value.

Maybe the original books or critiques of these books might help give you additional theoretical grist for the mill of your arguments about kitsch and retro. Also there’s the stuff about reception theory which ties consumers contexts into the interpretation and decoding of the meaning of products.

I don’t know really but could irony also have a possible relation to kitsch? In his article on irony in Obey the Giant 2001/2007 , Rick Poynor says, “…but the closing years of the twentieth century were the moment when irony became not just a useful device, to be applied when some specific occasion demanded it, but a routine, everyday attitude, a mass way of being, a social default. What irony offered users was an all-purpose form of protection. Just spray it on and nothing would pierce your psychological defences; nor would anything socially embarrassing leak out. Doubt everything, take it all with a large pinch of salt – yeah, right. In the 1990s, irony came to pervade just about every level of reality: magazines, movies, television…”, talking about Diesel’s customers, “…for whom almost any subject – politics, religion, the family, love, history, the environment – was suitable material for disengaged, postmodern fun.”

So irony is a kind of psychological process where you de-value an ideology or an idea or an accepted convention – so that it has no power over you and so you therefore can at the same time avoid having to get your hands dirty having to understand it first in order to argue directly against it – ie you don’t have to argue. You deflect, so that you are impervious and detached, and can continue with your own ways unmolested by eg. politics, religion, history, love, social criticism, responsibility…

Sorry if all of this is irrelevant to your argument. Hopefully there’s a nugget in there or a confirmation that you were already on the right track already!

Cheers!

Chris

15/04/2012 at 10:22 am

Sorry – I just thought that Thomas Frank’s Article – Why Johnny Can’t Dissent (in the taste text pdf) might also be useful – re the “counter-cultural idea” which has become “…the capitalist orthodoxy”.

ie that some forms of kitsch are rebellions against this “counter-cultural idea” or ideology. A kind of satirical standpoint, entwined with or allowing the celebration of an exaggerated aesthetic, bourne out of the exaggerated, cliched, clunky, overt, blunt cultural signifiers and figures of speech used in the original cultural artrefacts/products.

…kinda….

🙂