By PHIL PATTON Kitsch has history, too, and bad taste, just like good, has its fashions. Inspiration struck someone the day velvet car dice were born, just as surely as it did Duchamp or Daumier. An artist had first to imagine and paint those card-playing dogs before they could become a figure of fun in beer ads. Kitsch's history is illuminated by a strange show and a strange new book. The book is "The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience" by Celeste Olalquiaga (Pantheon, $30). Ms. Olalquiaga invokes the philosopher Walter Benjamin to argue for kitsch as a key to reverie and a gateway to the unconscious. She waxes lyrical about one of her favorite pieces of kitsch -- a hermit crab under glass from a seaside resort. The hermit crab is also an apt metaphor for the way kitsch inhabits the shells of old art forms. Today, kitsch for commerce often grows out of kitschy art. I thought of Ms. Olalquiaga's hermit crab the other day when I saw a CNN segment about a lobster car. A seafood restaurant in Orlando, Fla., had wrapped a little red New Beetle in a big red lobster, swiping an idea from Dali's famous 1936 lobster telephone. Fine or semifine art's degeneration into commercial kitsch is also the subject of the show at the Huntington Beach Art Center in California through Sunday. "Rascal in Paradise" is devoted to the work of Edgar Leeteg, the originator of a kitsch classic: paintings on velvet. Greg Escalante, the curator, explained that painting on velvet goes back to medieval monks. It was a fad in Victorian England, where proper young ladies in finishing schools turned out prim little pictures of fruit and flowers on velvet. Leeteg, who was born in East St. Louis, Ill., apparently came across some of these in heartland museums and never forgot them. When he shipped out to the South Seas in 1933, inspired by Gauguin, he turned to painting to pay his bar bills, rendering on velvet grizzled island warriors, happy diving boys and barely clad island women. In a few years, he invented modern velvet painting, with its portraits of Elvis Presley and John Wayne. Leeteg was also living a life as brightly tawdry as his paintings. "The American Gauguin," he called himself. A former sailor pal who ran a tourist gallery in Honolulu made him a star. Aloha Barney Smith compared the play of light against dark in the paintings to the technique of the Dutch masters, a school of painting he could be sure patrons would know from the cigar box. Before long, the paintings were selling for $5,000 to $10,000 each, and Leeteg had established himself in a gaudy estate he named Villa Velour. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1953. The demand he created was fulfilled by mass production in the sweatshops of Tijuana. South Seas and shell souvenirs: kitsch is often associated with vacation locales. Constantin Boym, a Russian-born designer who always brings a fresh take to American pop, has produced limited-edition "souvenirs for the millennium" based on items like spoons from Graceland or bronze Empire State Buildings. When people travel, he argues, they like to buy objects they would never consider at home. It might be called "taste takes a holiday." Artists like Jeff Koons have shown interest in kitsch for years. Now, Boym believes, kitsch is influencing designers and the mass media. Ever since the modernist critic Clement Greenberg first took on the subject in a famous essay in 1939, kitsch has figured as a kind of evil twin to modern. But Greenberg's description of kitsch as "vicarious experience and faked sensations" would be easy to apply to all sorts of products in the postmodern world. And putting kitsch in an artwork or in an art museum, shop or book changes it, perhaps redeems it. A store in Los Angeles called You've Got Bad Taste and dedicated to selling objects like "Dukes of Hazzard" watches has closed its doors because of declining business. But perhaps only the name was at fault. Much of the kitsch of the past flourishes today as camp, produced to be purchased ironically, to show good taste by disdaining bad. It has become fodder for what Peter Ward, author of "Kitsch in Sync: A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste" (Plexus, 1994), calls "a gloriously inverted form of snobbery." Thursday, April 1, 1999 · © 1999 The New York Times
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