Descent into kitsch~II
| Date | 19 April 2021 |
| Published date | 19 April 2021 |
Such inanities are almost daily in a state that was once witness to a great social, cultural and intellectual upheaval that happened from early 19th century to the late middle of 20th century in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent and from Ram Mohan Roy to Satyajit Ray. But if that period of history was the apogee of Bengali culture, it is very difficult to say if it is the very nadir or if the worst is yet to come.
But the culture that magnifies the lack of taste and extreme vulgarity or kitsch, born as offshoots of a sub-culture, is but a part of an increasingly globalized mass-culture from which one can't detach. If one rues the debasement of taste and vows immunity from it, he/she cannot remain untainted by its contagion in the long run even by a resolute will. If sound is an agent (loud caller tunes, amplifiers and boom boxes), so is the ubiquity of social media. But above all, the mongrelization of popular taste has thrived on the subalternization of the social milieu. Popular culture was a price, so thought the conservative critics of the 1950s such as Clement Greenberg, Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, Ernst van den Haag, and Q. D. Leavis at another remove, for the goodies of a democratic system to harvest. This transition from snobbery to frippery, from the ivory tower to the public space is both a class act and an act of subversion.
The American commentator George Will pointed out to how adults are...
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