December 17 2002

O come, all ye faithful, this seasonal sentiment is not peace, writes Giles Fraser.

The Catholic League of America earlier this year was up in arms about an exhibition in Napa, California, which included the caganer, a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles. The Catholic League was offended by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable.

What it didn’t appreciate, however, is that the Christmas story is supposed to be offensive, and that the caganer is a reminder of the theological revolution that scandalised sophisticated opinion of the first few centuries of the Christian era: that God became human, that the sacred was no longer to be protected from the profane.

In his great masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech novelist Milan Kundera develops an innovative moral vocabulary around the notion of kitsch. Kitsch, he argues, isn’t primarily about bad taste or the vulgarities of popular devotional images: kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit”. Kitsch is that vision of the world in which nothing unwholesome or indecent is allowed to come into view. It’s the aesthetics of wanting to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Kundera thinks theology to be the ultimate source of kitsch.

More… http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/16/1039656338478.html