Main entry:

Brown, Curtis F.

Title & Author:

Star-spangled kitsch : an astounding and tastelessly illustrated exploration of the bawdy, gaudy, shoddy mass-art culture in this grand land of ours / Curtis F. Brown.

Publication:

New York : Universe Books, 1975.

Description:

202 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (page 200).
Kitsch as only kitsch can: An intrepid introduction to schlock, camp, and kitsch -- American-style -- Rally 'round the flag, boys!: A misguided tour through politics and patriotism -- The gaudy and the Godawful: The spirit is willing but the kitsch is weak -- Everything but the kitschen sink: Household hints from Home Description -- The old sell game: This just has to be the most fabulous (foolish), fantastic (flagrant), far-out (fatuous)... -- A set of building blots: Unshapely mansions and other sites too humorous not to mention -- "...But I know what I like": Furthering the course of art -- The showy must go on: An excursion into excesses of films, fairs, and other show-biz happenings -- Rich Kitsch and other lifestyles: If you've got it, flaunt it. If you haven't, fake it -- From the cradle to the grave: A tacky world of birth, sex, marriage, and death -- Typing exercises: A key to racist, ethnic, and sexist kitsch -- Superkitsch: The worst of everything.

Summary:

Star-Spangled Kitsch is a lively round-up, in picture and text, of crass, ill-conceived, incongruous, trivial, muddle-headed, synthetic, meaningless, and embarrassing examples of taste in America. With verve and good humour, Curtis F. Brown discusses and displays mass-produced utilitarian and decorative items, as well as people, ideas, and lifestyles, in which the sublime collides with the banal to produce the ludicrous incongruity of elements that typify American kitsch: Kitsch in politics - from the hoked-up log-cabin image of William Henry Harrison in 1840 to the "just plain folks" style of Nelson Rockefeller in Coney Island. Religious kitsch - from Holy Medal diaper pins and Hail Mary face-powder boxes to Hollywood's Biblical blockbusters and a topless-bottomless celebrant at Pasadena's Hi-Life Social Club Church. Kitsch in home decoration - from the blue-blood mecca of a 19th-century Vanderbilt mansion to bogus Aztec living-room ensembles, "Instant Congo" furniture, and Santa Claus toilet paper. Kitsch in advertising - from an early Coco-Cola belt buckle depicting a naked nun to the near-sadistic depiction of water-logged caskets to engender guilt feelings in the bereaved. Architectural kitsch - from nonfunctional wooden church buttresses and Gilded Age palazzi to "the corniest building in America," "the world's tallest shanty," and a leaning Tower of Pizza. Kitsch in "art" - from an 1832 statue of George Washington looking like a Turkish bath patron to phony scrimshaw, Venus de Milo candles, do-it-yourself "primitive" plywood plaques, and Mona Lisa drawings-by-computer. Show-biz kitsch - world's fairs; dance marathons; the films of Griffith, DeMille, and Berkeley; the "music styles" of Lawrence Welk, LIberace, Jobriath, and Alice Cooper. Kitschy lifestyles - golf-and-jewel dog collars; breast-shaped ice cubes; hand-sewn, personalized blue jeans; his-and-her camels. Kitsch from birth to death, in sex and marriage - honeymoon hideaways; "virile" jockey shorts; gaudy gravestones; vinyl "sex mates"; wedding cakes, feasts, and kitschuals. Racist, ethnic, and sexist kitsch - 19th-century Negro and Jewish stereotypes; Shaft as Superstud; Fu Manchu as the Yellow Peril; present-day racism for fun and profit. The book culminates in a Kitsch Hall of Dubious Fame a pantheon of the incomparable, featuring, among others, Nixon's Ruritanian White House Guards, a mobile home facsimile of an ancient Egyptian tomb, an egg-shaped "contemplative environment," and salt-and-pepper sets in the shape of a headless torso or of John F. Kennedy. -- from dust jacket.

ISBN:

0876632568
9780876632567

Subject:

Kitsch United States.
Popular culture United States.
Kitsch États-Unis.
Culture populaire États-Unis.
Kitsch.
Popular culture.
United States.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 233030
Call No.: NX503 .B76 1975
Status: Available