Stop Using Kitsch as a Weapon: Kitsch and Racism
2009; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08935690903411602
ISSN1475-8059
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoAbstract What meaning do the ideas of "kitsch," and the paradigm of high and low culture, have when considering art produced by contemporary African American artists? Using examples by artist Michael Ray Charles, I argue that both are sustaining mechanisms of racial hierarchy and apartheid. Charles's work suggests that all visual culture—high and low, no style or subject excepted—maintains racist dialogues, and that all images speak race differently to various audiences. The distinctions between the high and the low in American culture seek to verify a fiction of a unified culture; as a result, the idea of kitsch sustains a system that imagines racially "good" or "bad" imagery instead of appreciating the role of all visual culture in the production of a racist society. Keywords: KitschRaceKara WalkerMichael Ray CharlesVisual Culture Acknowledgements An early draft of this paper was presented at the Southeastern College Art Association conference in 2007. I would like to thank Jack Amariglio, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, and Micki McElya for their close readings and helpful comments. Notes 1The exhibition "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" was curated by Philippe Vergne in 2007 for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The show then moved to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 2I would also argue that this static notion of kitsch has not fully considered the implications of gender in its construction. For a brief discussion of women and kitsch, see Emmer (Citation1998, 58). In terms of issues of sexuality, Susan Sontag and others have collapsed the ideas of kitsch and camp together in ways that demand more consideration (Sontag Citation1966, 275–92). 3This discussion of kitsch is expanded in my introduction to a forthcoming collection about the contemporary artist Thomas Kinkade. 4For just one example, see Ann Gibson's (Citation1997) detailed account of the challenges that nonwhite, nonmale artists faced in the 1940s and 1950s. While this has shifted slightly in the past twenty years, minority artists are still underrepresented in American museums, in biennials, and as faculty and students in academic art programs.
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