The artist Den­nis Hollingsworth posted a trailer to an ani­mated film called Cat Shit One which is a war story about mer­ce­nary sol­diers (cutesy ani­mated ani­mal char­ac­ters) fight­ing an ultra graphic war to defend a com­mu­nity under seige.

Den­nis added com­men­tary by Roger Scru­ton and Robert Ful­ford dis­cussing the nature of Kitsch and it’s effects on humanity—which is some­thing that has always inter­ested me. We live in an envi­ron­ment so sat­u­rated with kitsch that it seems impos­si­ble to imag­ine a time that was zero per­cent kitsch—it’s roots are in 19th cen­tury Ger­many (accord­ing to Wikipedia). I’m not sure if it’s pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate kitsch from Amer­i­can cul­ture, or if it’s even worth try­ing. Kitsch is some­thing that is always on the edge of perception—as soon as it becomes appar­ent it fades into the back­ground noise of every­day life or is incor­po­rated into high art. A cul­tural ouroboros?

I agree with the point that I think Den­nis is Making—that you could blame kitsch (in part) for our culture’s obses­sion with tor­ture (and worse) but the cru­elty exhib­ited by human soci­ety is some­thing that has always plagued us and deffinetly pre­dates any recent cul­tural changes… the com­pli­cated nature of human­ity warped by the ampli­fi­ca­tion and dis­tor­tion of our media soaked environment?

Some gnomes for read­ing this far (photo by Zellaby):

Tags: animation, discourse, kitsch

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