POSH LUST
¨In our voracious consumer society an act of purchase is not a means to an end: it is the end itself, and the higher the price, the more justified the purchase.¨ .....
¨Many works of art by some of the recently top-billed art stars combine a fetish for finish with a deadpan dumbness and lack of originality for which there is no expression in English, but the untranslatable Russian word пошлость (pronounced ¨poshlost¨) seems apt. Vladimir Nabokov defined it (and punned it ¨posh lust¨) as ¨not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. (...)
Michael Findlay, The Value of Art
¨Many works of art by some of the recently top-billed art stars combine a fetish for finish with a deadpan dumbness and lack of originality for which there is no expression in English, but the untranslatable Russian word пошлость (pronounced ¨poshlost¨) seems apt. Vladimir Nabokov defined it (and punned it ¨posh lust¨) as ¨not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. (...)
Michael Findlay, The Value of Art
