Is prog kitsch?

wilmon91 wrote: My view of kitsch is something cheap, colorful, simple, mass-produced, conspicuous, undemanding with entertaining qualities, and a product of it's time, like fashion. So it's not a product of timeless values. Something that gets dated quickly but may gain a nostalgic value with time.   If that's right (and I can be wrong), nothing could be stranger than to call prog kitsch! Can music be kitsch?

My guess why Peter Gabriel have never seen the prog tribute band Musical Box, or don't like bands playing tribute to the old genesis has maybe something to do with Kitsch. He doesn't like to see how he was in costume in the 70's, he doesn't like nostalgia.

Kitschy music.... maybe Billy Idols christmas album ?

one of Norways greatest painters Odd Nærderum is declairing himself kitsch and i would not say that his art is low quality, not apealing to the majoraty (his art is very vulgar), and if it is one thing Odd Nærderum doo care about it's quality

also Edvard Munch can be in some circuts be called kitch couse he manicly created dusins of copys and versions of his own art and paintings, their are atleast over 12 different versions of Scream (but only the original is worth 45 million $)


Edited by aginor - September 13 2011 at 16:20

from wikipedia on Nerderums useage of the term kitsch

Odd Nerdrum (born April 8, 1944 in Helsingborg, Sweden), is a Norwegian figurative painter. Themes and style in Nerdrum's work reference anecdote and narrative, while primary influences by the painters Rembrandt and Caravaggio place his work in direct conflict with the abstraction and conceptual art considered acceptable in much of his native Norway, and in opposition to the art of the time.

Nerdrum creates six to eight paintings per year. These include Still life paintings of small everyday objects like bricks, portraits and self portraits whose subjects are dressed as if from some other time and place, and large paintings, allegorical in nature that present a sense of the apocalyptic and again reference another time.^[1]

Nerdrum says that his art should be understood as kitsch rather than art as such. "On Kitsch", a manifesto composed by Nerdrum describes the distinction he makes between kitsch and art.

On kitsch

Odd Nerdrum has declared himself to be a kitsch-painter identifying himself with kitsch rather than with the contemporary art world. Initially, Nerdrum's declaration was thought to be a joke but later, and with the publication of articles and books on the subject, Nerdrum's position can be seen as an implied criticism of contemporary art.

A lot of bands that seem to function on the border of copying and 'being inspired by' could be considered kitsch, but it won't be the kind of information that makes my day.

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: I just went to the dictionary Kitsch  is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value or  : something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality

I think this just shows the limitations of dictionaries. Neither of those give a full account of the many ways in which people may and often do employ the term "kitsch".

It's a t**ser's word at any rate.

ExittheLemming wrote: It's clearly a very difficult word to define as it denotes so many different things to different people (but you can't blame dictionaries for people saying 'bad/wicked/sick' when they mean 'good' now can yer?)

Oh, I'm not blaming dictionaries for failing to keep up with the evolution of language as that's inevitable. I'm merely suggesting that we should be aware of it and not rely solely on dictionary definitions to support our arguments. During my short spell as a trainee teacher every other essay I received seemed to start with "The Oxford English dictionary defines [word pertaining to essay topic] as...", or worse still "www.thefreedictionary.com defines, etc.". Dictionaries are marvellous things, of course, but woe betide us if we start using them as an alternative to thinking.

ExittheLemming wrote: ^ Ok fair point (I clearly misinterpreted your post) but for me everyday language is evolving by regressing like ya dig bro innit?

Not wishing to utterly derail this thread, but as a bit of a word geek I just can't let this lie. People would have said exactly the same of the state of language ten, twenty, two hundred years ago. The idea of language regressing relies on the assumption that there is some fixed point of lingual perfection from which we are slowly declining. So when was that? 1962? 1886? At what point did our language become something to be protected from further erosion?

As I see it, there will always be slang, there will always be formal language and there will always be dozens of subtle levels in between, and all of it is in a constant state of change, just as our society is. People decried the emergence of so-called "txtspk", for example, but as far as I can tell its use has so far been largely limited to texts, social networking sites and desperate advertising campaigns. Let language evolve, I say! Especially slang, as that's where all our best words come from.

thellama73 wrote: While I agree with you that it is meaningless to say the language is degrading, thereby placing a value judgment on today's slang viz a viz yesterday's slang, there is a general tendency for language to become more regular  with time, which I think destroys a lot of its characteristic charm. One of my pet peeves is the disappearance of many irregular past tense forms. Example: the past tense of "to dream" used to be "dreamt" but now it is usually "dreamed." Likewise "leapt" has been mostly replaced by "leaped."This is happening all throughout English and I think it's a shame.

Yeah, I can't argue with that. Still, the one crumb of comfort with that is we, as individuals, still have the power to resist anything we see as unnecessary change. I still use dreamt and leapt in my writing because the alternatives just look wrong to me. Likewise, I steadfastly refuse to adopt the American "-ization" of -ise words, however often spellcheckers attempt to force it upon me in the name of "standardization" (or "standardisation", as I'd prefer).

Prog? Kitsch? Only after it's main period of originality, just like any other genre of music.