July 2016 Theme Day: Look Down

Artichoke Basille's Pizza from The High Line. Manhattan NYC

"Memory does not make films, it makes photographs." - Milan Kundera

Click here to view thumbnails of all participants in this theme day!

PHOTO FRIDAY

THE CURRENT CHALLENGE

Fri Jul 01, 2016

This week’s challenge:

‘Contrast’.

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Street Dog

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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Rothko

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.”
― Milan Kundera

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Kitsch

-iPhoneography-

Kitsch gets a lot of attention in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, so you should make sure you understand the basic concept. Kitsch is a German word that's been adopted by a number of other languages, including English. It refers primarily to art that is overly sentimental or melodramatic, and so refers to aesthetics. What's interesting is the way Kundera uses the concept in his novel, not to talk about art, but to talk about political ideology.

To begin, Kundera asserts that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal "in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist". He's not just speaking literally here, but about all the bad, disgusting, negative, violent, depressing things in the world. "Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence".

Kundera then moves on to politics. "Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements," he says. He gives the example of politicians kissing babies as the ultimate kitschy political move. 

So how does one fight kitsch? One answer has its roots in the original, artistic definition of kitsch as sentimental or hokey art. From this perspective, beauty is the enemy of kitsch. The other answer has its roots in the political definition of kitsch as forced conformity. In this sense, someone who insists on individuality is the enemy of kitsch.

Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments, I appreciate them all. Stay tuned.