The Bad Taste: Cultural Politics of Trash and Kitsch

During the workshop, from a theoretical and practice-oriented perspective, we will investigate the ideological, political and historical parameters of “taste” in popular culture, explore what is meant by designations such as canonical “high culture” and popular “low culture”, and who is empowered to make these distinctions. At the intersection of a cabaret and a tv show, through creating performances with highly charged imagery juggling, among others, the aesthetics of comics, advertisements, popular music, and video games, we explore how bad, vulgar, kitsch or valueless aesthetic can be used as an oppositional aesthetic challenging hegemonic class, gender, and racial hierarchies, normative behaviors and ideologies.

Texts, extracts:

• Pierre Bourdieu: “A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”, 1979
• Kevin Glynn: “Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television”, 2000
• Ruth Holliday & Tracey Potts: “Kitsch!: Cultural Politics and Taste”, 2012
• Gillian Pye: “The anthology Trash Culture”, 2010
• Andrew Ross: “No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture”, 2016
• Susan Sontag: “Notes On Camp”, 1964

​Photos: © Boglárka Zellei,  2015.