#but post complaining about corny gay art has me thinking

[noisytenant]

i have a soft spot for kitsch. i love compulsively collecting those stupid sticker sheets with bijons and bunnies and bears in all kinds of expertly designed inoffensive situations. i love heart and star and flower hair clips. i'm staring at a phone strap with beads that are shaped like fried eggs and you bet your ass they've got little smiley faces on them. i got it without even knowing what i'd attach it to

so anyways, i think of kitsch as kind of like, an aesthetic lubricant, or a sort of balm. it's easy to swallow because it aspires to be exactly what it is; in the case of my favorite, it aspires to be--and is by generally agreed-upon metrics--cute.

i think perhaps what separates typical kitsch from corny art is that a corny piece seems to aspire to something greater, often something political or cultural, yet ultimately is seemingly nothing more than exactly what it is. a frog with a sassy catchphrase, maybe a pun. the deeply personal and political nature of queerness captured in a few vector lines and a gradient. there is nothing to "figure out", you have everything you need. no questions at this time.

i think perhaps the idea is for the cutesiness to be a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. one might think combining those thorny and often painful feelings associated with politics and identity and suturing them to something saccharine and simple makes them more bearable.

but i feel like the "what you see is what you get" nature of kitsch isn't something that can easily transfer to things adjacent to it. a political slogan or symbol, ostensibly, reveals an ideology, a context, a history. a cute drawing of a frog rarely does the same (not to say it never can). when placed together, do you want to flatten the political message into an unquestioned notion, a "vibe", or do you want all your artistic decisions to be considered and exposed as they might be in any other context?

it feels like a kind of art that doesn't take itself seriously, so i think those of us who hold a great deal of seriousness find it jarring. because of the kitschiness, the implicit message to not think about it too hard, it ends up being confounding, because how could i not think about it? at times the underlying politics seem to slap you in the face, the simplicity of the motifs lay bare the careful calculation involved, and all you can think is, "this is really corny and lame".

i don't feel deeply wounded by much of it because i'm lucky to surround myself with people who have more personalized and thorny artistic tastes. and in general, i have lower stakes for politics in images because i seek politics in my life. but it is tiring to see, and it sometimes reveals deep and troublesome assumptions about the world, and worst of all--it's uncool. so yeah, pack it up. but i will be taking one of those cute cat stickers on the way out, yes, thank you