Word: kitsch
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...born in Tikrit (though Saladin was a Kurd), and at the Battle of Hattin in Galilee in 1187, he won the bloodiest and most comprehensive victory that Muslim armies ever achieved against Christian Crusaders. The murals in Baghdad of Saddam on a white horse, with a drawn sword - laughably kitsch to Western tastes - were a deliberate attempt to link him to Saladin?s blessed memory...
Currin isn't the first artist to work at the intersection of art and trash. The kitsch shenanigans of Jeff Koons have been a major inspiration for him, and so has the later work of Francis Picabia--those painstaking oils from the 1940s that Picabia copied from naughty photographs. But in the mid-'90s Currin began to introduce old master borrowings into his work, at first conflating them with soft, pillowy porn, then working them into more conventionally scaled nudes and lately scattering them into satires of life among the well dressed and well fed. His art-history references come...
...artists have always quoted from the past, but Currin, like a good postmodernist, puts his quotes in big quotation marks. Walk through any of the later galleries in the Whitney show, and what you experience is a sustained conceptual flutter, a continual flickering between high and low, Mannerism and kitsch, Parmigianino and sleazerino. It's a strategy that makes his work radical and familiar at the same time, like an especially snappy new running shoe, which in any market is never a bad idea...
...Disneyesque recreation of St. Nick's abode. (The big guy in the red suit is available for photo-ops.) The kids can even hand deliver their Christmas letters at Santa Claus' post office, which comes complete with a souvenir shop manned by elves. The experience is every bit as kitsch as it sounds, but your children-and the child in you-will love...
...wooden lattice gateway off Al-Ahmadiya Street in the old quarter of Deira, the shops of the souq jangle with glittering wares, ranging from discreet chains and dainty earrings to clunky bangles, collars and belts. The selection is broad enough to suit all tastes, from pure gold to pure kitsch. Tourists are left dazzled, not just by the variety and quality of merchandise on display but also by the sheer quantity of it: there are 10 tons of gold on sale at the souq at any given time. And you won't find better value anywhere. With no sales...