Customer Reviews

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience

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This is the most original work of non-fiction I have ever read. The author is able to write at great length about very unpromising subjects--such as snow-globes or the emotional significance of dust--with a sort of piercing intelligence that allows her to uncover beauty and meaning where others might see only bad art. Although frequently humorous, the book never ridicules kitsch; rather it discusses deep-seated human needs, and then shows how kitsch is an attempt to satisfy them. I read this book over a year ago, and I still find it to be a source of inspiration.

This brief, souvenir-inspired history of kitsch is also an ornate, brooding meditation on memory. In "trading the life of the memory for its cultural fossil," Olalquiaga reveals the origins of Atlantis in popular culture, of snow globes (the earliest said to feature Marie Antoinette with parasol), of aquaria and their folly-like porcelain castles, and notes that both Colette and Eva Peron amassed large collections of glass paperweights. Relating her feelings about a failed love affair and the redemptive qualities of Rodney, a hermit crab trapped inside her favorite paperweight, the writer transcends her anonymous epigram, "Styles die, only kitsch survives."

Been longing for another text that finds an unusual subject, then stretches canonical works of theory to say something about them that seems meaningful till you think about it for 15 seconds? Ever wondered what it would be like to read a book that intersperses the Paris arcades, regurgitated Walter Benjamin, the Crystal Palace, regurgitated Lacan, paperweights, regurgitated Colette's daughter? Here you go. The sheer number of typos suggests the author didn't see fit to do a second draft, or retain the services of a proofreader. The color plates are very pretty, but the book is plain bad, and not in any good (kitschy) way. Stick to Gillo Dorfles for a good book on kitsch.

I don't find this book derivative of Benjamin so much as openly drawing on him. Olalquiaga doesn't ape his work on kitsch - she applies it intelligently to her own research. Artificial Kingdom struck a deep chord with me. I concede that it is not the most rigorous examination of the kitsch experience possible, and some chapters are separated by intermissions of glazed ruminations that haunt the analysis and reverberate beneath it with personal conviction. But this is what I appreciate most about the book. You could do worse than recall in your reader Bachelard's reveries on the poetics of space. Olalquiaga's passage describing Rodney's marine home crystallizing around him into a glassy temporal suspension is as beautiful as anything by the sources from which she appears to draw her models.

At times silly in the worst academico-critical way (the Nautilius in Vernes' Leagues is 'uterine'), and rather derivative of Walter Benjamin. However, charming, good fun, but check out Svetlana Boym's (lopsided) 'The Future of Nostalgia' along with it, if you get a chance.