"Trash has given us an appetite for art"
About this Quote
Kael’s line is a dare: stop pretending you were raised on masterpieces. “Trash” isn’t just disposable culture; it’s the gaudy engine of modern taste, the low-budget B-movies, lurid tabloids, overripe melodramas, and mass-market entertainments that train the senses. She’s puncturing the genteel myth that serious art is best approached through purity and reverence. Instead, she suggests our cravings are educated the way real cravings are: by habit, pleasure, and repetition.
The brilliance is in the reversal. Conventional wisdom says trash corrupts; Kael says it prepares. It gives us tempo, shock, immediacy, a vocabulary of desire. Once you’ve absorbed the cheap thrills, you develop discernment almost accidentally. You start noticing what hits harder, what lingers, what has craft instead of just noise. “Appetite” matters here: not “appreciation,” not “understanding,” but hunger. Kael is defending the body’s role in aesthetic life - the quickened pulse, the laugh, the recoil - and implying that art without appetite becomes a museum exercise, not a living encounter.
Contextually, this is Kael in mid-century America, when film and television were collapsing the distance between high culture and mass culture, and critics were forced to decide whether to scold the crowd or listen to it. Her intent is populist without being naive: she grants trash its power while insisting that power can be redirected, refined, and ultimately turned toward art.
The brilliance is in the reversal. Conventional wisdom says trash corrupts; Kael says it prepares. It gives us tempo, shock, immediacy, a vocabulary of desire. Once you’ve absorbed the cheap thrills, you develop discernment almost accidentally. You start noticing what hits harder, what lingers, what has craft instead of just noise. “Appetite” matters here: not “appreciation,” not “understanding,” but hunger. Kael is defending the body’s role in aesthetic life - the quickened pulse, the laugh, the recoil - and implying that art without appetite becomes a museum exercise, not a living encounter.
Contextually, this is Kael in mid-century America, when film and television were collapsing the distance between high culture and mass culture, and critics were forced to decide whether to scold the crowd or listen to it. Her intent is populist without being naive: she grants trash its power while insisting that power can be redirected, refined, and ultimately turned toward art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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