“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, April 16, 2011

Buddhist Kitsch


Taiwanese aesthetics is remorselessly sentimental. The point seems to be to signal that we are in a shared space where there are shared feelings (the good old sensus communis). (According to some very good conversations I had with one of my hosts, Hannes Bergthaller, whose wife is Taiwanese.)

The hotel we stayed at in the mountains gave me a toy sheep, soft and cute, as a gift to say thank you for staying there.

The gift shop in the small town was a paradise for fathers of seven year old girls.

Buddhist shrines often have small statues of Snoopy, Buddha, Donald Duck, and Mazu in a row.

There is of course the Greenberg argument that kitsch is a mode of fascist aesthetics.

I disagree. I think kitsch is a symbol of shared weakness—it couldn't be less fascist if it tried.

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