Well done Mr. Koons. Very American of you.

Missmc gave the new au pair a tour around London yesterday.  We stopped by the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Serpentine, children in tow.   Inside were things that ought to appeal to children.  But they did not.  Three inflatable monkeys, arms linked, cascaded from the ceiling, holding up a chair.  A lobster did a headstand balanced with one claw on a refuse bin, the other on a chair.  Pop pop Popeye made an appearance in several large scale kitschy paintings with some more inflatable animals and airbrushed girls.  A host of seaside inflatables did tricks around the room.  

We continued onward to lunch at the Orangery and discussed the exhibition.  The Italian au pair found some English words to say something to the effect that the show gave her nothing to think about.  The eight year old gave it a 3 out of 10.  Even with a vast background of visual art to prop up looking at pop readymade hybrids, Missmc was drawing an utter blank.  The Serpentine staff were trying to sell catalogues with a Big Issue like fervour.  The subtle approach to catalogue sales had been thrown out the window.  The whole exhibition experience was so so utterly American, from the overt commercialization, the cheap ready-made, the advertising-like veneer of the paintings, and all things that go Pop, and disappear, leaving a trail of waste that would not ever decompose.  And so, therein, lay the content.  Missmc gingerly picked it up and looked it in the eye.  The American Dream was full of stuff.  Useless stuff.  Materialistic.  Produced in China.  Props.  Reliant on pure associational sensationalism appealing to base emotions.  

Well done Mr. Koons.  Very American of you.  I hated it all.

Garden Gnomes and the Banking Crisis

Last evening, the pilates-thin-cheekbones-to-die-for friend of Missmarketcrash was lamenting the times. She leaned over with gravity and said a friend had just lost his business. Nodding heads offered compassion all around. And then, she said, "Well, afterall, he was selling Garden Gnomes". The wine went giggling across the table.

With ponderance, the demise of the Garden Gnome in the midst of this economic crisis could be quite ominous. On an environmental front, the Garden Gnome is the great protector of wildlife, and might indicate the dwindling importance of green issues and global warming. Butterflies beware!

The gatekeepers of fine taste have banned the Garden Gnome from the Chelsea Flower Show for a few years, making the Garden Gnome a class issue, as Brits tend to do.

The Garden Gnome is kitsch, pure and simple. Kitsch has a particular appeal to little old women and gay men. Both groups represent a good amount of disposable income for folly. Kitsch lovers divide into two classes, with the former class, made up mostly of little old women, representing the original derivation of the word. The whimsy that provides an unsubtle sentimentality, a heart on a sleeve, a kind of un-intellectual aesthetic response of pure emotion. The second group of kitsch lovers, primarily gay men but with some seepage into other parts of the population, see kitsch as a kind of irony. The drama of badness is a mask for the same kind of sentimentality but with a ponderous element. In other words, they deconstruct their kitsch. It is a love of sentimentality as an idea rather than unedited sentimentality itself. And, the third rare group - the ultra-kitsch-ers, deconstruct it, lose the irony, and love it with a straight face.

So, why then, is kitsch out of fashion? Some say kitsch is aspirational - a mere copy of something that was extraordinary reduced to mass-production and offered to the masses. Which makes it a no-no in a class-based society. And a no-go for the new austerity as aspirational has acquired a particularly bad name of late. As for the sentimental element of kitsch - emotion was certainly out for a long while in the art world, post abstract-expressionism when conceptualism came to reign. In parallel, kitsch came backheavily into the art world, via Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons amongst others. Following that, the ultra-kitsch-ers came into popularity in the art world in a big big way in the last decade. So where are we now, with a failed Garden Gnome business and what does that mean for the world-at-large?

Hegel saw kitsch as a kind of false nostalgia. I think that is where we are now. We crave real nostalgia in times of instability. If the Garden Gnomes disappear for long enough, they will be transformed culturally back into real nostalgia.

Now - will the same kind of thing work for banks?