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Naive/primitive/folk art v. fashionista art

Kitsch is not technically inept art; kitsch is unethical art, which can be technically adept. (Hermann Broch, paraphrase)


Consider the above example of naive/primitive/folk art, and the below example of fashionista art.

In the naive art painting, we see a lady playing a piano for an audience of small birds. Birds make music: they twitter and tweet (not in a social networking app, of course). The naive painting is art about art appreciation, and healthy human communicating with healthy nature. Naive persons' hope to live in the peaceable kingdom, to be let back into Eden.... (Of course, primitive/folk art can be kitsch, e.g.: when it is made to sell to tourists and collectors for money, and not for authentic ethnic purpose → which is why it cannot really be naive because it is [perhaps naively] aware of being exploitive.)

Consider the fashionista (or perhaps fashionisto: here) painting or print or reproduction of a print (below center), which re-presents a can of condensed commercial soup[1]. So what? It is just commercialism about commercialism. But it is not, so far as I can see, a critique of commercialism → It's just more commercialism. No soul. No emotion. Not a commentary on the misfortune of meaninglessness. Just more stuff with very little meaning. Does it even encourage persons to eat, to persist metabolism? [Not sure about this.] It's just a high-priced bauble in an economic bubble.[2]

All the artist (below left) needs is a big bubblegum bubble burst on his face to hide his big open empty mouth-hole. War-hole. Nobody made Mr. WarholAll trash to recycling![3][4] show this picture to anybody: he or she or other or it must be proud to look like an amented head, like the blank windows in Philip Johnson's amoral Chippendale skyscraper (AT&T/Sony Building, New York City).

Is that a slug in his mouth? Give this guy an Agpar test and see if he's a stillbirth! The amented head makes Homer Simpson look good, and not just like a cartoon figure. It's scary, too: it looks like the gaping mouth of a moray eel, or maybe he forgot to put in his dentures?

Andy Monroe Soupcan Warhole, self-promoter and artist. BMcC artwork commenting on Warhole painting of Campbell's soup can. Click for referenced War hole.
Brillo

Another kind of such kitsch art would be a life-size still life painting of a swim and tennis club poolside table with a cocktail on it with a little Made in China toothpick and paper umbrella sticking out of its Maraschino cherry. This art explicitly encourages persons to waste their days lounging poolside, absorbing ultraviolet radiation. "Every work of art is a wish fulfillment" (Arnold Hauser) – it is clear what such a fashionista's wish for living to fufill is.

Bing Crosby smiling for the camera to make a buck and be happy.

If the fashionista artist wants to go the whole way, following Robert Venturi's example in architecture, if the artist arts Campbell's soup cans, the artist will make some slight modification to the soup can, which modification only the postmodern artists will know about. Like maybe spell Campbell's "Campbells" by red-painting over the apostrophe[5] → It will take Michelangelo level genius to think up that! This will titillate all the postmodernist artists about their artistic cleverness and also as to how stupid their customers are to not notice anything (especially, obviously, not noticing they are being "taken"). Merry! Merry!

¡See a piece of Pablo Picasso kisch: here. See curatorial connoisseurship in action: hereNext

Hokeywood

"...[H]er youth (as Greta Gustafsson) in Stockholm and her cultivation by a director who 'had been looking for a beautiful girl whom he could completely mold.' Upon her arrival in Hollywood in 1925, she did not work her way up; as soon as M-G-M found her, the studio decided she would be their next leading lady. 'Greta Garbo — Perfection!' blared their publicity campaign.'She was... "bewildered, unsophisticated," a young woman "suddenly transported to Oz."' We hear from fans like Katharine Hepburn, who said [Greta] Garbo had 'a real, real gift for movie acting.... Photographically she had something that nobody else had. That's what made her. You don't become that famous for no reason.'" Sounds like Andy the War hole, doesn't it? "And from non-fans like Marlene Dietrich: 'She is the kind of person who counts every cube of sugar to make sure the maid isn't stealing, or eating too well.'" ("Greta Garbo: The Most Enigmatic Movie Star", NYT, +2021.12.03, Mark Harris) A real life Barbie Doll? Apparently her most memorable line was: "I want to be alone", in "The Grand Hotel" (1932). Please click here for a picture of this [fill in the blank] from "The Mysterious Lady"' (1928). What mystery? PR? Could she pass a Turing Test, or was she a Ms. Dialtone ? String her up like Clara Petacci!

"The Grand Hotel" was 1932. "Nosferatu" was 1922. "Greed" and "The Battleship Potemkin" 1925. " Napoleon" 1929. You've come a long way, baby, to get where you've got to today. You've got your own cigarette now, baby, you've come a long, long way! ("Virginia Slims" ad, 1968). America has been running on empty, running around for a long, long time. Not everything that came out of Hollywood was kitsch, just most of it was, like most of America, on "The good ship lollipop" (1934)....

Don't think twice, it's alright. (Bob Dylan)
+2024.02.16 v074
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Footnotes

  1. Secret message just for you, my reader: The picture is not, I repeat: not a reproduction of an Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup artwork. It is a BMcC work of art using the Warl=hol original as its base, but I hae modified it, and if you can't tell the difference, what else can an art faker con you into? Click the can to see the original.
  2. Wikipedia, anent Andy WarholAll trash to recycling!: "He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well." He became one: A sublunary "star" with non-HVAC "fans".
  3. He opens his mouth and he tells it like he sees it, maybe? "I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." Let judgment of esthetic merit always be decided by popular vote!"
  4. Your Comment on Warhol's Images of Prince: Social Commentary or Copyright Infringement?
    The New York Times <comments@nytimes.com>
    7:57 AM (1 hour ago) [+2022.08.16]
    Your comment has been approved!
    Bradford McCormick | New York
    Mr War Hole should like this. He always wantd publicity, so here's some more of it for him. Self-aggrandizing narcissists like him stir up unnecessary trouble. I use pictures and modify them for serious political and other thoughtful commentary. Will I be silenced because this fashionista publicity seeker was making hay while the sun shined? Mr. War Hole famously said that anything a lot of people like has to be good or else they wouldn't like it. Seriou thinkers have always been concerned about majority opinion favoring bad things. Mr. War Hole needs to be treated like the celebrity in the old American Express credit card ad who walks up the the front desk in a 6-star horal the the desk clerk asks: "Who?" and the celebrity is very disappointed. Then he takes out his AmEx card and the clerk immediately snaps to attention to provide superior personslized service to the cardholder. "Andy, who?"
  5. Your Comment on The Supreme Court Is Wrong About Andy Warhol
    The New York Times <comments@nytimes.com>
    11:46 AM (1 hour ago) [+2023.06.05]
    Your comment has been approved!
    Bradford McCormick | New York
    Andy Warhol was just a fashionista. The real innovator was Marcel Duchamp with his Readymades. Everything else is just deductions from the axiom set he defined. The prices people pay for Mr. Warhol's whatever-they-are's is sort of like the prices people paid for tulips in the Netherlands in 1636. Be that as it may, he did transform one image into another image, which should have been covered by fair use. Not necesssarily better, but different. Copyright is not about quality, just about plagiariam. Should Kohler or whatever company produced Mr. Duchamp's Founfain have sued him and demanded a licensing fee and part of the profits? But why people get all excited about War Hole art makes no sense to me except that they must be superficial fashion followers not connoisseurs of the lovingly shaped products of master craftspersons (watch the 1953 film by Kenji Mizoguchi: "Ugetsu"). Kitsch. As Hermann Broch observed: Kitsch is not inept art but unethical art, which caters to sentimentality . As for Soup Cans I've done a Warhole on Mr. Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans. I erased the "e" in "Condensed". And I even have scholarly citation information, referring to another fop's work: Robert Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture". But I am not famous, So I don't get any money out if my conceptual art. On the other hand, since I am nobody and make no money, nobody sues me, either.
    Reply  2 Recommend

BMcC signature seal stamp. Modelled on 18th century messenger's letter box in collection of Suntory Museum, Tokyo. Japanese write poems and prayers on slips of paper which they tie into knots like this shape although with longer legs. Prayers are often tied to branches of trees which can look like they are covered with snow. "Symbol of a symbol, image of an image, emerging from the destiny that is sinking into darkness...." (H. Broch, "The Sleepwalkers", p.648) Always remember. Add value. (This image created not later than 21 May 2003)
Invenit et fecit
 
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