Here’s the link to a great post by Matt Pearce, over at the Missouri Review Blog. He takes on the recent criticism of “kitsch culture”–and suggests what feels like the rub: “at points it’s going to be hard to tell if all the opprobrium is legit lit criticism or just thinly veiled ageism.” For a quick catch up, let’s generalize:
Kitsch (or Quirk)
Jonathan Safran Foer
Ira Glass
Miranda July
Wes Anderson
Dave Eggers
The Atlantic Monthly article that Pearce references holds this excerpt as both a working definition and indictment:
Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd “ but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair–a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Is it that easy to achieve? I think both articles (“Wonderbread” by Melvin Jules Bukiet, and “Quirked Around” by Michael Hirschorn) that claim the fallacy of cheap wonder misread the aesthetic they cartoonishly describe. What is at stake for work that operates in the “quirk mode” is the tension between the mutually exclusive poles of irony and the earnest gesture. The best examples achieve both in the same moment. That’s not cheap–it is art. Irony, or sincerity, alone (and often taken to the extreme) are cheap. Examples abound, and both can be mass-produced ad infinitum. And there are lots of low-level attempts at the “quirk aesthetic” that do feel cheap and easy–I’ve got no beef with that. I just think most of the work by the authors, filmmakers, and artists in the kitsch column above often achieve more. Steve Zissou is by and large a flop, granted–but when they see the tiger shark, in that goofy peapod of a submarine, and the shark with all its cheap computer animated affect, there’s some bizarre, magical pleasure. Maybe Sigur Ros’ dramatic attending music has something to do with it.
So are the articles of Bukiet and Hirschorn legit cultural criticism, or something else?
Maybe it isn’t ageism, but to these eyes it missed the broad side of the barn.