Odd Nerdrum (1944 - )
Lifespan: 1944 -
Related: Norway - kitsch - painting - artist
image sourced here.Shit Rock (2001) - Odd Nerdrum
Biography
Currently reading impressive work by Odd Nerdrum On Kitsch (2001). Odd considers himself a kitsch painter, and he maybe a kitsch painter as far as technique goes, he certainly is not with regard to subject matter, as Shit Rock illustrates.
A different tactic is taken by the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, who composed a manifesto entitled "On Kitsch", where he makes a political point of declaring himself a Kitsch painter rather than an artist, even though very few critics would actually think of his artwork as kitsch.
Nerdrum has claimed that in his career and the career of many other artists, the art establishment, what he calls the Curatoriat, imposes values and prevents honest personal expression — he turns around the formulations of Adorno and Kundera. He states that while art serves the public, kitsch serves personal expression; art serves politics, while kitsch loses itself in the eternal and is pure sensuality, "naked talent exposing itself". Nerdrum declares: "Art exists for art itself and addresses the public. Kitsch serves life and addresses the human being."
Postmodernism is also under attack by Nerdrum, because it holds to a camp taste, which only appreciates kitsch in terms of the irony of a "failed seriousness", while he argues that kitsch should in fact be looked at as real, sincere expression of beauty.
In any case, whatever difficulty there is in defining its boundaries with art, the word kitsch is still in common usage to label anything felt in bad taste.--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#Postmodernism [Aug 2005]
see also: art - art theory - modernism - modern art - Immanuel Kant - 2001 - human condition - Aristotle - Plato - Ernst Bloch
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