BTW, it looks like some Pommies agree with me about Tony Blair's shallowness.... Here's how editorialist Theodore Dalrymple depicts him as the figurehead of Kitsch Socialism:
From Blair reading his poem at the TUC to Mo Mowlam taking off her wig in public, new Labour promotes emotional kitsch, argues Theodore Dalrymple
Kitsch is hard to define but easy to recognise. It is ubiquitous and all but inescapable in the modern world. For example, there is kitsch on sale everywhere tourists gather in large numbers: from Venice to Toledo, from Cambridge to Cracow. An aesthete who visits these glories of the past might with reason declare: "In the midst of art, we are in kitsch." It is the aesthetic of the age.
Clearly, kitsch does not displease or offend everyone, or even very many people. Almost as a sine qua non, kitsch is mass-produced: no one would go to the trouble of manufacturing a musical cigarette box in the guise of a Venetian gondola with a revolving ballerina on its prow unless he thought he were going to sell a lot of them. The spread of kitsch artefacts requires first, a mass market of people with money to dispose on inessentials, and second, techniques of mass production. In the pre-industrial era, inferior products were bad art or bad workmanship, but not kitsch.
It is characteristic of kitsch that it should hint at refinement but be in execrable taste; that it should make reference to something real but be entirely ersatz. The producers of kitsch may be cynical and exploitative, but consumers are sincere and in deadly earnest. They know that art exists and is a good thing that lends lustre to its patrons and collectors, but cannot distinguish the real from the fake, however grotesque the latter.
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More on how throwaway politicking became the Labour Party's ultimate Survival Kitsch:
consider.net |
