Contemporary painting and Indian politics

[ramana]

No I am using the kitsch as defined by Ramachandran and his brain process. And my insight is that the contemporary Indian art being a product of the Marxist dialectic is by nature kitsch.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>What, if any, is the key difference between "kitsch" art and the real thing? </b>Some would argue that what’s kitsch for one person might be high art for another — that the judgment is entirely subjective. objectively distinguish the kitsch from the real, how complete is that theory and in what sense can we claim to have really understood the meaning of art? One reason for thinking that there’s a genuine difference is that one can "mature" into liking real art after having once enjoyed kitsch, but it’s virtually impossible to slide back into kitsch from having once known the delights of high art. Yet the difference between the two remains tantalizingly elusive. <b>I speculate here on the possibility that real art involves the "proper" and effective deployment of certain artistic universals, whereas kitsch merely goes through the motions — as if to make a mockery of the principles without a genuine gut-level understanding of them.</b>

I am reminded of patients with right hemisphere stroke who, when asked to draw an object (say, a horse) will create a reasonable likeness, often containing all the required details. But what’s missing is the essence of the horse; the drawing seems almost too detailed but lifeless. <b>This suggests that what we call "the artistic sense" is normally in the right hemisphere — which is damaged in these patients — and the left hemisphere doesn’t quite "get it" even when it tries hard.</b> <b>It leads me to wonder whether "kitsch" is really a feeble, ineffective attempt by the left hemisphere to usurp the intuitive artistic sense of the right. In trying to paint or sculpt, perhaps the left hemisphere tries to "translate" the visual code of the right hemisphere into its own language of logical propositions or explicit rules and, of course, fails to do so – resulting in what we call kitsch.</b> This explanation has a pop–psychology "ring" to it but it may not be too wide off the mark!
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