[Xmca-l] Re: Verismo and Kitsch

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Henry!

Thanks for your post. It's not that I question therapies. I question the display of therapies inside therapies, as a production of proof and represented as a prototype to legitimize therapy. The spectacle of it. The surveillance of it, as described by the Nissen paper.

So to answer your question, therapies are not kitsch, though by my own definition they could be. For ethical reasons, I don't think therapies should ever be kitsch, just like I don't think abdominal surgeries should be kitsch, or legal representations for that matter.

Perhaps I have not explained well enough. Kitsch is intended to produce a preordained result regardless of the reality at hand. It has been stripped bare of all improvisational aspects, and has a formulaic determination which starts out seeming authentic but then creates a separation from what is authentic, like eating cotton candy, that seems to take up space, but is just white sugar once it's in your mouth, and provides no nutritional value. There is nothing therapeutic about kitsch! It is death by puns!

I actually find theater (in the theater) to be a great therapy because of it's ability to conjure, to cultivate, the always emerging present moment, even if you already know the story. Good art does this too. Kitsch refers to a moment that is never there, because it is always referencing the formula of itself, closed off from the rest of the world; it is solipsistic. 

Is that a better explanation?

Thanks for sending the ZPD paper, I'll take a look at it!

Kind regards,

Annalisa