elaborate on kitsch and mass culture in the 50s? i'm interested 👀
oh yeah so i picked this book up at the secondhand store from the 1$ rack like 5, 6 years ago or something and only just got around to reading it, it's flight maps: adventures with nature in modern america by jennifer price and it's about america's changing relationship with conceptions of nature. i'm only halfway through but i'm really enjoying it.
it was on the 1$ rack because the prev owner had done a LOT of underlining, tho curiously not on this chapter, which of course has me acting in suit. the chapter in question is "a brief natural history of the plastic pink flamingo", i.e. the tacky king of lawn ornament kitsch. i'd recommend the whole chapter really (the whole book really), but in particular, re:the post i left that tag on, page 134, where i left the comment "my tumblr dash about marvel movies" in the margin in reference to basically the entire page.
here's a few choice quotes:
Greenberg warned that kitsch "[drew] its life blood" from real Culture and Dorfles now lamented that the "vampire kitsch" had evolved into "one of the crucial problem sin the history of art and aesthetics."
Critics had assailed the mass-produced arts for many decades, but the evils were multiplying as fast as plastics, and from Right and Left, the new Jeremiahs fulminated against mass art, fiction and movies -- and were on the verge of uniting against the nascent sins of television.
"Mass culture threatens... to cretinize our taste."
Mass culture, Macdonald feared, "voids... the deep realities," and "substitute[s] for the... originality... of real life." Greenberg had attacked kitsch as "vicarious experience and faked sensations" and "the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times." Dorfles agreed: it "killed all ability to distinguish between art and life."
now obviously some of this is a bit more dire than people tend to talk about marvel, but it's definitely following a long tradition of moral panic about mass art and mass culture - the idea that watching these shitty ass movies is eroding our ability to appreciate good art and preventing or harming the ability for good art to be created and appreciated by ruining our abilities for critical thought
honestly vis a vis marvel and critical analysis i think it's probably kind of the other way around - people are complicated and the culture is complicated and i think it's more likely that people enjoy marvel movies because they don't have critical thinking skills because of a variety of things going on in our society (school systems which teach to the test rather than actually teaching, the internet making it really easy to encounter a lot of information from a variety of sources of various repute with no way of telling which are actually reliable & allowing you to form long-lasting and relatively insular communities and form echo chambers, puritanism) than that people watched marvel movies and their critical thinking skills immediately shrivelled up and died.
but that's also not to say marvel movies are a neutral entity - just that they're not solely responsible for the death of all art or anything, they just suck ass, aren't good, and also are military/imperialist propaganda. which is the real reason why no one should watch them
(tho honestly if you wanna watch braindead propaganda drivel fuckin whatever. if you're aware and not internalizing the harmful messages like. who give a shit. it's your time to waste. the harm comes not from the consumption of media itself but from the lack of critical thought to prevent you from internalizing the bullshit, and the resultant actions you take)
(just dont pay for it for gods sake)
