ABCD Lars & Roemer

K as in Kitsch
Roemer
van
Toorn
in
conversation
with
Lars
Lerup
“When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun,” Joseph Goebbels once said.
“When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my checkbook,” says the cynical
producer in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris. And a leftist slogan inverts
Goebbels’s statement: “When I hear the word ‘gun,’ I reach for culture.” Indeed
culture has become mainstream, almost as big an industry as the military. In that
sense the subversive quality of the avant-garde (and its pleasure principle) has
become a potent energy source for the creative class, from Andy Warhol to
Damien Hirst, and the experience economy it is running. No wonder that
“starchitects” and their iconic buildings are celebrated these days. How would
you position architecture once it becomes part of this mass culture of kitsch?
Does kitsch have potential? Should we ignore the spectacle-ization of life
altogether – return to silence and autonomy – or rework it from within, look for
the gaps, ride its waves like a buccaneer?
Kitsch as a way for the elite to separate themselves from those with
bad taste has suffered inflation. Now “bad taste” is so prevalent that
the word kitsch may have lost its punch. I don’t see much hope for
kitsch, first because it has lost its ability to differentiate, and second
because, when it does distinguish the good from the ugly, it is still just
bad taste. My analytical affection for suburbia may have influenced
my thought here, since everything built there is “as if” – whether
English Tudor, French Provincial, or Spanish Hacienda – but when
you look closer at houses built within these narrow stylistic confines,
you find innovation that makes it almost okay.
The celebrity culture is, of course, deeply longing for more celebrity,
now at any cost. Among the momentarily chosen – every year
someone is airbrushed away and replaced by some new phenomena –
one senses an internal bonhomie that reveals the volatility, vacuity,
and fear of fading behind such fame. Having been a backbencher in
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