ABSTRACT
Kitsch is the perfect name for a particular variety of commodification of modernist aesthetics in the postmodern period, when the barrier between "high" and "low" culture breaks down. If kitsch is the commodification of modernism, camp (celebrated in a well-known essay by Susan Sontag) is the self-aware postmodernist "repurposing" of objects originally created for a mass audience. O'Hara flirts with several aesthetically impure elements, including camp, sentimentality, a deliberately pretentious mock heroic mode, and feigned casualness, in a way that would have been inconceivable for Lorca a mere twenty or twenty-five years earlier. Robert Motherwell was an earnestly "literary" painter of the New York School, bringing together documents from Dada poetry and frequently incorporating literary references and whole poems into his own paintings and prints. Billy Strayhorn's ephemeral but highly significant "queer encounter" with Don Perlimpin, on the other hand, is a suggestive anecdote that illustrates the immense variability of Lorca's afterlives.
