Tacky Quotes

“The Cheesecake Factory remains successful because it’s fancy enough to seem classy, but silly enough to seem comfortably trashy.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“Life is short. It’s important to attach oneself to the pieces that stick, regardless of whether somebody else believes the stuff is any good.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“For my dad, who is dead but is hopefully taking a break from smoking weed and eating fried chicken on the astral plane to read his daughter's book.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“I invite anybody else who’s sick of smirking behind the general public’s back to do the same. We have so little time to engage with the art that our fellow humans have created, and of course nobody is obligated to like all of it. But to decide that someone’s work has no merit because that person is drunk, or sick, or unhappy, that is a judgment call that none of us should feel qualified to make.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“I was content to let my skin be dessert because I hadn't yet learned about the ways a woman might touch the crème brûlée of her psyche until she was barely recognizable as human.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“I realized, in other words, that I’d waved goodbye to sincerity too early. It’s a common evolution, I think, but it’s one that I’m ready to reverse.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “Against Interpretation” that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Meaning: the interpretation of art is a tiresome pseudoscience, and the magnetism of art is what has always saved it from becoming dull, weighted down. It’s something we see and feel first and foremost, before we attempt to understand it. It’s a pretty rich line of thinking for an art critic, no?”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“I never appreciate the suggestion that I’m somehow a shallower person because my aesthetics are as hodgepodge as they are, and I don’t believe the opposite is true, either. We are all equally people, crammed full of the same wretchedness and chugging the same daily poison.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

“I could tell he was trying to think of a way to share his misgivings with me without inadvertently making the object of those misgivings more attractive by virtue of his disapproval.”
― Rax King, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer