Shtick Is an Anagram of Kitsch
March 24, 2009
The title of this post has been appropriated from a heady and brilliantly executed essay by one of MBP’s favorite writers, Garth Risk Hallberg (author of A Field Guide to the North American Family). Over at the literary blog The Millions, Hallberg has flayed Jonathan’s Littell’s The Kindly Ones. More than a review of a novel, however, the piece examines the evolution of how writers, filmmakers and other artists use the Holocaust as the vehicle for their creative expressions.
Here is the essence of what Hallberg is getting at: “Artists young enough to ask interesting questions about, say, the eating habits and family lives of the Nazis, are artists whose aesthetic standards have been formed, not in the charnel-house of history, but in our fluid, polymorphously perverse popular culture.”
This assessment speaks to the technological trappings of our times and how an ever-growing battery of devices and doo-dads influences how we mediate history, whether from centuries ago or last week.
Of course, these overriding cultural tendencies also influence the visual presentation of ideas. Check out the “How Superman Would End the War” cartoon from the February 2, 1940, issue of Look Magazine and then the Punk Rock Holocaust 2 poster, brought to you by Vans.
Hallberg’s essay should be required reading for anyone that wants to use the word “postmodern.”
