The Artificial Kingdom

By Celeste Olalquiaga

Subjects: art, memory, Art, sentimentality, past, attachment, sentiment, imagination, figurines, tourism, fantasy, New York Times reviewed, snowglobes, mementos, collectibles, loss, preservation, kitsch, Kitsch, narrative, remembrance, keepsakes, remembering, nostalgia, time

Description: The Artificial Kingdom is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste," or a cheap imitation of art. Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch.