Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Kitsch and Camp: The PowerPoint Twins
What's Kitsch? Kitsch is a black velvet painting. Garden gnomes, lava lamps, troll dolls, flamingo lawn ornaments, dogs playing poker -- all are classic kitsch. Often of poor quality, kitsch is an object that appeals to lowbrow, popular, or tacky tastes.
What's Kitsch? Kitsch is a black velvet painting. Garden gnomes, lava lamps, troll dolls, flamingo lawn ornaments, dogs playing poker -- all are classic kitsch. Often of poor quality, kitsch is an object that appeals to lowbrow, popular, or tacky tastes.What's Camp? Camp is the presentation of kitsch. Jon Waters, Cyndi Lauper, and Kiss are deliberately campy. Tom Cruise, Judy Garland, and Betty Davis are (probably) unintentionally campy. A campy presentation is so outrageously dramatic, inappropriate, gaudy, affected, or out-of-date it's ironic and funny.
What's contemporary kitsch & camp? When you watch VH1 "I Love the [insert decade here]" - you are watching a top 100 kitsch & camp report. In 3 years, what will be considered kitsch and camp for the '00 decade?
Will PowerPoint presentations make the kitschy cut? After all, there's a certain black velvet quality to many PowerPoint presentations......as well as to most Keynote presentations.
Oh, let's face it. Everything Apple is deliciously kitschy-campy. The Apple "Zen Aesthetic" is contemporary kitsch. By combining this spare design style with:
Kitsch and camp are iconic, ironic fun. When you're deliberately kitschy or campy, you can come across as witty and self-deprecating. However, if you're unintentionally Tom Cruise-y or Apple-campy, you risk appearing self-important or buffoonish.
Try jumping on a couch these days without appearing ironic.
Commit to your camp. If you have a kitschy style, make sure you affect a campy mannerism. This can help you more fully engage your audience. There's no sense having a clipart-y, cluttered, bullet point-y, totally 1990's Microsoft-kitsch PowerPoint presentation if you don't drive it home by, say, swaggering like Johnny Depp in Pirate of the Caribbean. Cringing like the evil Mr. Burns from the Simpsons while presenting with a very 90's slide design is also an excellent kitsch-camp combo.
What's on your kitsch list? What is contemporary kitsch that is currently not commonly recognized as such? What contemporary '00 kitsch & camp will become classic kitsch and camp in the '10 decade?
- the Jobs priestly-black dress code
- the gratuitous and cliched body language of Buddha-pose-faux-humility,
- PlaySkool-ish, Web 2.0-y graphics,
- the promotion of i-Everything,
- dancing iPod silhouettes --
Kitsch and camp are iconic, ironic fun. When you're deliberately kitschy or campy, you can come across as witty and self-deprecating. However, if you're unintentionally Tom Cruise-y or Apple-campy, you risk appearing self-important or buffoonish.
Try jumping on a couch these days without appearing ironic.
Commit to your camp. If you have a kitschy style, make sure you affect a campy mannerism. This can help you more fully engage your audience. There's no sense having a clipart-y, cluttered, bullet point-y, totally 1990's Microsoft-kitsch PowerPoint presentation if you don't drive it home by, say, swaggering like Johnny Depp in Pirate of the Caribbean. Cringing like the evil Mr. Burns from the Simpsons while presenting with a very 90's slide design is also an excellent kitsch-camp combo.If you're going to be design-kitschy, you'll want to commit to being presentation-campy.
What's on your kitsch list? What is contemporary kitsch that is currently not commonly recognized as such? What contemporary '00 kitsch & camp will become classic kitsch and camp in the '10 decade?
Labels: design, fun, images, photography, PowerPoint
¶ 11/13/2007 01:51:00 PM
Comments:
Links to this post:
<< Home
LOL! This is a good one. So they actually do have Kitsch camps? Way too funny. Your observations about apple though... Do you mean that every LOGO is modern kitsch? To be honest it doesn't appeal to me - it strikes me through simplicity (and that's certainly not something that defines kistch)
As logos go, I like Apple a lot. It was an instant hit and easy to understand.
But then again, I have a fondness for fun and silliness. And I love all the kitschy things Apple does with its logo -- Rainbow stripes! Glass apple! Flat apple!
While the logo itself is simple, it allows itself many (many) kitschy applications.
All in good fun...
Thanks for commenting, mig!
But then again, I have a fondness for fun and silliness. And I love all the kitschy things Apple does with its logo -- Rainbow stripes! Glass apple! Flat apple!
While the logo itself is simple, it allows itself many (many) kitschy applications.
All in good fun...
Thanks for commenting, mig!
I think you are on to something here. If kitsch is a mimicking of superficial qualities of genuine cultural artifacts, then so much of the low-cost designer-ish goods available are probably going down as tomorrow's kitsch.
I'm a sucker for design*Sponge-esque wares, but it's so ridiculously fashionable and popular that it's bound to become the very stuff we laugh at ourselves for adoring five to ten years later.
Post a Comment
I'm a sucker for design*Sponge-esque wares, but it's so ridiculously fashionable and popular that it's bound to become the very stuff we laugh at ourselves for adoring five to ten years later.
Links to this post:
<< Home
