Lana in Tigerland: Creativity of Kitsch (not only) in a Music Video of a Contemporary Pop Culture Icon
Abstract
Should we believe theorists who claim that kitsch represents an aesthetic or ethical defect? Should we be convinced that, even nowadays, good kitsch is a „contradictio in adjecto“? Trying to overcome several clichés on kitch — a victim of cultivated taste — the paper deals with the aesthetic phenomenon of kitsch on the background of the audiovisual production of contemporary pop‑singer Lana del Rey. The first part analyzes the music video Born to die (2011, dir.
Yoann Lemoine) with a special focus on its kitschy and affective qualities. The second part outlines the issue of kitsch in art and its definitions across the rhetoric of modern and contemporary aesthetic discourse.
The main goal of the study consists on one hand in an explanation of how this particular production diversifies and expands the category of kitsch in order to put it into a better light than aestheticians usually view it, and on the other hand of how this crucial, yet almost exclusively dismissed phenomenon of popculture dissolves the boundary between „low“ and „high“ culture. Along with that, a new definition of postmodern and popcultural kitsch is offered — kitsch as a transhistorical and affective principle which intensifies the aesthetic contact with a work of art, and aestheticizes life experience.