Word: kitsch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first-night hoopla at Munich's Gloria Palast was pure Hollywood-grunting cops wrestling with crowds, limousines bulging with black-tied men and mink-draped starlets. As for the movie, it was a blatant rehash of Grand Hotel (1932). It was, sneered the Süddeutsche Zeitung, "pretentious kitsch [trash], a perfection of mediocrity, apotheosis of the single-entendre. Everywhere the box-office sledge hammer. In short, a German film...
...would not lead to the disappearance of the commercialism which Madison Avenue has come to symbolize. There have even been recent indications that the Avenue itself is restive about the present situation. The workers in mass media labor to produce what the Germans call kitsch, vulgarization of the better elements in a native culture...
...people continue to live in stuffy homes," says Louis Wijsenbeek, director of The Hague's Municipal Museum, "it is hard to see how a man of use to us or to the world can develop." Last week, in an exhibition called Kunst en Kitsch (Art and Claptrap), Director Wijsenbeek gave the public some pointers on what a well-appointed house should be. His Kunst living rooms had a few simple pieces of light-colored modern furniture, prints by Braque, Matisse and Leger. Kitsch rooms had overdecorated wood buffets, shrieking landscapes on the walls, artificial flowers on the table...
Spectators giggled nervously, awed by the bare austerity of the Kunst rooms, or embarrassed to find that the Kitsch exhibit almost exactly reproduced their rooms at home. Sighed one onlooker: "It's so gezellig [cozy]." Snapped Director Wijsenbeek: "It's not gezellig. It's stuffy." The art critic of The Hague's Het Vaterland hedged: "The line between Kunst and Kitsch isn't always easy to draw...