Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste - Hardcover

Holliday, Ruth; Potts, Tracey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719066158 ISBN 13: 9780719066153

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2012

Synopsis

From bottle gardens, batman and the bachelor pad to garden gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a range of objects to explore the meanings and uses of kitsch.

About this title

About the Authors

Ruth Holliday is Professor of Gender and Culture in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds

Tracey Potts is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham

From the Back Cover

From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers.

Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised - progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool - to inform notions of identity and sensibility. The figure of 'kitsch man' - a degenerate with politically dubious taste - looms large in the extant biography of kitsch and is here shown to be gendered, racialised and classed. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself, especially as kitsch enters a seemingly more casual phase of its lifecourse. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratised in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgements of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed.

Above all, the story of kitsch proposed by the authors is intended to disturb kitsch's reputation as the source of a ready-made sensibility and politics. Kitsch has a history and not, as it has been supposed, an essence and is consequently the site of love, hate, joy, exasperation, irony, nausea and all of the twisted possibilities between.

From the Inside Flap

From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural politics and taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers.Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool to inform notions of identity and sensibility. The figure of kitsch man a degenerate with politically dubious taste looms large in the extant biography of kitsch and is here shown to be gendered, racialised and classed. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself, especially as kitsch enters a seemingly more casual phase of its lifecourse. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratised in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgements of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed. Above all, the story of kitsch proposed by the authors is intended to disturb kitsch s reputation as the source of a ready-made sensibility and politics. Kitsch has a history and not, as it has been supposed, an essence and is consequently the site of love, hate, joy, exasperation, irony, nausea and all of the twisted possibilities between.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719066158
• ISBN 13: 9780719066153
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288