When forged paintings could do a better job

I’ve loved all my art history lecturers. All of them were brilliant speakers. It is not clear if it was their passion for the subject or mine that made me hang on to their words so. Robert Mansfield was one of several lecturers whose classes I looked forward to. Then one week, his class veered from traditional art history topics and he gave a lecture on kitsch. All good, don’t get me wrong. I like kitsch, it’s fun.

Except the following week he did part 2. Kitsch as art history? Twice?

Then I realised what Mr Mansfield had known all along – some of the young people in class couldn’t tell the difference between art and kitsch. Well, I was in undergraduate America after all…*

The lectures on kitsch were amusing: pictures of giant cow sculptures in front of countryside dairies, home-made carvings in the gardens of roadside houses and stuff like that. Easy. You could spot the kitsch a mile away – if you were inbred with European unwitting snobbery or had decades of experience of looking at art.

The kitsch lectures would never have reappeared in my memory, if last week, in Vietnam, I hadn’t come across this:

The venue prides itself in being an ‘art boutique hotel’, that has a collection of ‘exquisite portraits’. Well if you call overpainted digital prints that are hung in a room named ‘Windsor and Buckingham’ exquisite…

Even in these small photos you can see that the so-called art is not even of forgery quality. The oversaturated colours were painted by someone copying from a computer screen who has probably never seen a Romantic painting. Nothing wrong with that – it gives employment to a skilled arts & crafts graduate. The funny part is that, unlike Las Vegas (which, incidentally, is better value for money), this place takes itself seriously.

[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””][singlepic id=444 w=300 h=203 float=right][/wpcol_1half][wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””][singlepic id=445 w=190 h=203 float=right][/wpcol_1half_end]

I’m perhaps being a bit harsh, interchanging kitsch with pretentiousness so carelessly… (insert essay on intercultural aesthetics and Asian trends in luxury decor here).

The hotel has a few genuinely good design features, such as the toilet signs and the emergency exit map: [wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””][singlepic id=440 w=338 h=248 float=center][/wpcol_1half][wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””][singlepic id=441 w=350 h=248 float=center][/wpcol_1half_end]

But the pièce de résistance is this wonderous sign to call housekeeping – a Banksy, no less:

I do think his paintings are exquisite, don’t you?

* Thank you, student exchange programme, for your affordable intercontinental destinations.

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