Charles Jencks Quotes

Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

It's a pragmatist's business, comedy. Start off with good intentions and references to the Pompidou Centre and you end up with boiled sweets and a pantomime cow.

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

Kitsch is very important to me.

I find comedy to be one of the highest of the art forms.

I'm not for gratuitous nudity, but if there's humor, I don't have a problem.

I don't think comedy will ever die.

I think that comedy is one of the more serious things that you can do in our day, especially in the world that we're living in.

Sometimes people say I'm a political comedian, which, actually I'm not. I'm a comedian who sometimes discusses politics, culture - again, the word 'politics' to me is just life.

The people never endeavor to ridicule those they love and esteem, nor will they suffer them to be ridiculed. If any one attempts it, their ridicule returns upon the author; he makes himself only the object of public hatred and contempt.

You have to have a sense of humor about all of it - the Emmys and politics and everything.

In comedy, it's so subjective; there is no right or wrong.

Music is never inherently funny!

For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It's very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

Good taste" is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.

There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art.

Style and taste do not have anything to do with the other. It's the difference between wit and humor.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

You can get away with saying much more with humor than you can with a straight face.

I admire Laura Bush because she's the only librarian who would marry an illiterate.

In my first video diary I explained my love for women who have a taste in carrots. Since then, I have received plenty of carrots. Now I also have a keen interest in women who like Lamborghinis.