Kitsch

07/19/22 • 53 min

1 Listener

What do garden gnomes, the #BlackLivesMatter black squares of June 2020 Instagram, and formulaic pop songs all have in common? They’re kitsch. In episode 56 of Overthink, Ellie and David investigate the history of kitsch as an aesthetic category distinct from art. How does the superficiality and mass-reproducibility of kitsch explain its uses as a tool of fascist propaganda? They discuss the American cultural instinct to deploy inspirational quotes in response to national trauma, kitsch as an antidote to working class alienation, the decline of emotionally significant, critical art, and more.
Works Discussed
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”
Tomáš Kulka, Kitsch and Art
Catherine A. Lugg, Kitsch
Zach Brown Band, “Chicken Fried”
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, Dogs Playing Poker

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Previous Episode

Surveillance

Feeling watched? Suspicious your Google Home is a front for Big Brother? From period tracking apps to police body cams, surveillance has immense social-political implications for our everyday lives. In episode 55 of Overthink, Ellie and David draw on social philosophy to understand our experiences of mass surveillance. How do technologies of surveillance that promise convenience and freedom lead us to welcome new forms of control into our lives? They also consider how these technologies have empowered people to take up new methods of resisting state violence.
Works Discussed
Anders Albrechtslund, “Online social networking as participatory surveillance”
Roger Clark, “Information technology and dataveillance”
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage”
Steve Mann, “’Sousveillance’: inverse surveillance in multimedia imaging’”

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Next Episode

Waiting

Has society progressed past the need for waiting? In the time of smartphones and their 24/7 carousels of distraction, the liminal agony of waiting seems like a thing of the past. In episode 57 of Overthink, Ellie and David explore waiting as a persistent mood of existence. Why do we flee waiting? How can waiting be an active, liberatory act rather than something we just passively endure? They dive into absurdist theater, the figure of the messiah, time under capitalism, and modern life’s discomfort with uncertainty.
Works Discussed
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Manpreet Janeja and Andreas Bandak, Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope, and Uncertainty
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having
Gabriel Marcel, “Desire and Hope”
Harold Schweizer, On Waiting
Imad Shouery, “Phenomenological Analysis of Waiting”

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