In the book’s 14 dishy, memoirish essays, she hopes to convince us of just how wonderful it can feel to ingest aesthetic trash - if we could just let go of our snobbish inclination to enjoy it ironically, if at all. In her first essay collection, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, Rax King decides to skirt the question, writing: “I still don’t really know what means, though like Supreme Court Justice Stewart once said of the threshold for obscenity, I know it when I see it.” King, who’s based in Brooklyn and hosts the podcast Low Culture Boil, claims she never outgrew her unabashed childhood love for too much. Would a “Notes on ‘Tacky’”-style essay bounce right off the leopard and pleather and rebound on the writer? Is it worth pinning down exactly what tacky is when its essence is to laugh in the face of neatness or order? One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.” Which makes me wonder if there’s room for sincerity about tackiness.

In her definitive “Notes on ‘Camp,’” about tacky’s sentient cousin, Susan Sontag wrote, “It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. If minimalism is hyperconscious hyperselectivity, tacky is clueless excess, conveniently available at any price point. The specter of tackiness haunts our aesthetic attempts as the physical embodiment of trying too hard - the cardinal sin of ironized 21st-century social interaction. It’s consumption that looks like consumption, camp without self-awareness. The rest of us, though, live in fear of tackiness. Kids’ taste can’t be trusted because they don’t have taste. Kids rhapsodize about bug-eyed dolls with raspy mini boom boxes inside them, light-up teapots that giggle out tinny tunes. The more flammable the material, the higher likelihood they want to wear it: Dick and Jane favor poly blends.

Left to their own devices, their preferred attire would mix the pomp of Liberace with the frouf of the Elizabethans. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo by PublisherĬhildren are inherently tacky.

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