Decorative aspects of reality with reference to sociological painting

• Main Author: Clark, Dorothy
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Rhodes University 1974
• Subjects: Decorative arts
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1010501

The writer could not blame the reader for finding the title to this essay couched in somewhat academic terms. It must be said immediately that the title is a fake -- or that the following essay is a fake; the title has pretensions to the academic -- the essay has not. All academicism no longer has an independent existence -- it operates by formulae, is mechanical, uses faked sensations and vicarious experience and borrows its tricks and themes from a mature, established culture close at hand. This ' culture's life's blood is looted, given new twists, watered down and served up in academic terms. For these reasons, academicism and Kitsch are the same -- both change according to style and yet are always the same; both are the epitome of all that is spurious in our time. So, academicism could be said to be the 'stuffed shirt-front' for Kitsch. Preamble, p. 1.