The Artificial Kingdom is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste," or a cheap imitation of art. Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch. Tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century--when industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale--Olalquiaga describes the at once exhilarated and melancholic atmosphere where kitsch came to life. In an arresting mix of theory and anecdote, she examines objects from both the past and the present, probing the fluid boundaries between reality and fantasy, and finding in kitsch a phenomenon as relevant to our own time as it was to the era that made it a massive experience.

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience

Arts & Photography

Olalquiaga, Celeste

History & Criticism

Pantheon

Employing an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the complexities of contemporary urban culture, this work examines a diverse range of cultural expressions that may be considered typical of the 1980s, from retro fashion, to Latinization, to the recycling of religious imagery as kitsch. The topics Olalquiaga explores are shown to be exemplary condensations of different cultural currents, and she establishes reception as a vantage point from which to think about city life. "Megalopolis" sees in 1950s and 1960s retro fashion a re-enactment of space-age fears of technological dehumanization, in the resurfacing of kitsch an attempt at recovering emotional intensity, in an aesthetics of death and ruins a lament for the loss of a concrete and organic reality. Consumption is the basis of an unavoidable postmodernity in which the traditional ways of looking at the world have become so many icons; technology is the new language through - or against - which experience is articulated.

Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities

Literature & Fiction

Univ of Minnesota Pr

Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities [Feb 01, 1992] Olalquiaga, Celeste ...

From her pet glass-globed hermit crab Rodney to the Victorian era's Crystal Palace, Celeste Olalquiaga offers a meditative look at the origins of kitsch and what kitsch tells us about the conflicts between the real and the artificial, tradition and modernity, nostalgia and melancholy. Olalquiaga artfully traces this form to the mid-1800s and establishes kitsch as a sensibility of loss -- a yearning for objects to help recapture the past -- and explains how these artifacts respond to a deep-seated human need for meaning and connection with nature. The Artificial Kingdom beautifully elucidates this aspect of culture as an attempt to recover what industrialization has destroyed.

The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience

History

Univ. of Minnesota Press

Book by Hickey, Dave, Park, Kyong, Miller, John, Bunschoten, Raoul, Olalquiaga, Celeste, Allen, Stan

Lusitania: Sites and Stations Provisional Utopias

Reference

Hickey, Dave

Allen, Stan

Miller, John.

Bunschoten, Raoul

Park, Kyong

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Lusitania Pr Inc

Home and the World: Architectural Sculpture by Two Contemporary African Artists : Aboudramane and Bodys Isek Kingelez (Focus on African Art)

Museum for African Art (New York, N. Y.)

Prestel Pub

El reino artificial: Sobre la experiencia kitsch (Spanish Edition)

Editorial GG, SL

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Books by Olalquiaga, Celeste