Ace wrote: Burial's music, like Kavinsky, etc..., might be considered art, but "art" - just like film and music - is something that is currently defined by consumerism and has been reduced to KITSCH. You can still call it art, or film, or music, but with this added amount of democratically-innduced postmodernism/consumerism, kitsch is going to be tagged on to it.

[just cuz I’m curious about what Ace has up her sleeve]

I’m not gonna sit here and re-write Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” but I will say this:

Newsflash: ROCK AND ROLL IS KITSCH!

Say what you want about the proliferation of kitsch and camp in the visual arts and literature, ALL things camp are allowed within the magisterium (great word, Steve) of rock and roll because rock and roll has ALWAYS been camp and no quantity of Melt Banana albums or guitarists in Glenn Branca’s orchestra is ever going to change that.

I mean, Jesus, how can a musical form played with electric guitars be anything but?

For an explanation of why it’s ok to like kitsch, read Sontag.

tocharian wrote:rock and roll has ALWAYS been camp and no quantity of Melt Banana albums or guitarists in Glenn Branca’s orchestra is ever going to change that.

I mean, Jesus, how can a musical form played with electric guitars be anything but?

I don't understand this argument. What's inherently camp about electric guitars?

Maurice wrote:I don't understand this argument. What's inherently camp about electric guitars?

The same thing that's inherently camp about electric organs, electric cellos, plastic flowers and television. The affectation, the degree of remove from nature.

A lot of rock's charm is that it's kitsch that doesn't know it's kitsch. It's in earnest.

tocharian wrote:A lot of rock's charm is that it's kitsch that doesn't know it's kitsch. It's in earnest.

If only it had the same effect on you.

Rock and roll can't be half as kitschy as this electronic music because of societal appeal. The very AIM of this music is global consumerism. No matter how much consumerism was tagged on to rock, its aspirations were not global (i'm even skeptical that it is rooted in consumerism, but whatever).

I can waste my time reading Sontag, but she was virtually incapable of making a statement which wasn't a gross exaggeration, so her defining rock and roll AS kitsch seems like another one of those; "On Camp" is another example of how it seems that everything she can't classify into black and white are either camp ("good") or bad ("everything else").

Perhaps we're diverging on the point of media - if something electric qualifies it as kitschy then we have a basic disagreement there - but to me, music like dub-step, whether electronic or not, is stripping down music to beats and beeps, which has distinct societal appeal. That is what i think accounts for the difference.

tocharian wrote:

Maurice wrote:I don't understand this argument. What's inherently camp about electric guitars?

The same thing that's inherently camp about electric organs, electric cellos, plastic flowers and television. The affectation, the degree of remove from nature.

Tree -> cut wood -> finished wood -> guitar -> electric guitar
Tree -> cut wood -> finished wood -> cello -> electric cello
etc. So the electric guitar is "camp" but the acoustic guitar is not? If degrees of manipulation from an untouched state are what matter, then anything more manipulated than the untouched tree would be "camp." The electrified instruments are only slightly more "removed" from "nature" than the non-electric instruments. Electricity is "natural" as well.

tocharian wrote:A lot of rock's charm is that it's kitsch that doesn't know it's kitsch. It's in earnest.

Do you work in advertising?

You should read Sontag, not only because she did much to move discussion of art forward in the later half of the 20th century--exaggerations or no--but because she can talk about kitsch in terms other than this binary consumerist/not-consumerist thing. She talks about it in terms of affect, paradox and the utility of style as typified by someone like Oscar Wilde... which is way cooler.

Oh Ace, READ IT!

I totally did read it! This "binary consumerist/ non-consumerist" thing has more to do with political philosophy and democracy's effect on people than anything else.

The funny thing is, rock is less kitsch to me than this philosophical focus on camp, and high and low art. Affect, paradox, utility of style... breaking art down on such clear-cut lines of distinction such as gender, race, and sexuality is NOT what great philosophical/ artistic analysis is.

Honestly, I could write a treatise on this subject, and i actually AM writing a paper on it for school, so I can't imagine I'm being too eloquent at the moment; however, I will say, as I've said before on this forum, that my criticisms of kitsch stem from a social mindset defined by democratic ideas, which tend to be less subtle and more demeaning than art made in other cultural situations.

tocharian wrote:Newsflash: ROCK AND ROLL IS KITSCH!

That settles that then.

Retard.