A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience
'The Artificial Kingdom' is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste", or a cheap imitation of "real" art. Reclaiming kitsch from the dustbin of art history (the word derives in part from the German "kitschen", to collect junk from the street), Celeste Olalquiaga proposes that it is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, and shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Olalquiaga gives us a startling analysis of what and how we see when we look at kitsch.
Tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century - when industrialisation transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale - Olalquiaga describes the at once exhilarate, and melancholic atmosphere in which kitsch came to life. Full of arresting anecdote and revealing cultural history, 'The Artificial Kingdom' examines objects from the past and the present - snow globes and paperweights, aquariums and grottos, fake mermaids, the Crystal Palace - probing the fluid boundaries between reality and fantasy, and finding in kitsch a phenomenon as relevant to our own time as it was to the Victorian era that made it a mass experience.
