The Authority of Kitsch

Chapter 4 reads Homenaje a la cursilería’s format as a potent gesture against bourgeois notions of etiquette, taste, and social practices. In a manifesto accompanying the exhibit, El Techo emphasized lo cursi (not just melodramatic flare and excessive garishness [tackiness, or kitsch when applied to an object], but also excessive sentimentality bordering on the ridiculous [schmaltz])and lo pavoso(the distasteful conduits of bad luck). The balleneros believed that these Venezuelan traits were often repressed in official discourse, particularly those intended for international circulation. Yet here the group reclaimed them as the defining parameters for its selection of materials. Indeed, Homenaje a la cursilería represented an oppositional posture against the banalities and superficiality of the country’s outwardly projected state of affairs. The recuperation and redirection of the kitsch aspects of Venezuelan culture became the basis for a critique on the partial nature of national “modernity.” At the same time, El Techo’s use of these popular behavioral traits also required it to confront and destabilize the Situationist notion of the spectacle, that numbing corpus of commodities and experiences that alienated the capitalist body from the pain of real life.