Kitsch, Whimsy, and the Aesthetics of Kleptocracy: Wealth Accumulation and Misappropriation under the Marcos Administration

-

Kitsch, Whimsy, and the Aesthetics of Kleptocracy: Wealth Accumulation and Misappropriation under the Marcos Administration


A Study. August 25, 2025


Introduction


In the Philippines’ unfolding socio-political drama, the materialistic accumulation of wealth and systemic corruption under the current Marcos administration has rippled through every sector of society—art included. As ghost flood-control projects siphon billions from public coffers, the visual landscape of Philippine art has responded with two unexpected yet profoundly intertwined strategies: kitsch’s flamboyant excess and whimsy’s subversive play. Far from mere aesthetic detours, these modes function as critical reframings—reflecting, critiquing, and at times coping with the grand theft of the commonwealth.


The Political Economy of Ghost Projects


Since 2022, the Department of Public Works and Highways allocated roughly ₱556 billion for flood-control infrastructure, part of a ₱2.6 trillion three-year budget. Yet investigations have revealed a staggering pattern of “ghost” and substandard works across Bulacan, Pampanga, Cavite, and Metro Manila. In Bulacan alone, contracts worth nearly ₱19 billion were awarded to a single firm, Wawao Builders, for projects that either collapsed or never existed. Seminal leaks expose license-renting schemes: triple-A contractors lease their credentials to smaller firms, ensuring both shoddy construction and swollen kickbacks. Reports estimate that only 30–40 percent of allocated funds actually reached tangible infrastructure; the rest vanished into private pockets, financing luxuries far removed from flood-ravaged communities.


This “ghost flood-control scandal” has triggered Senate and House inquiries, the creation of the Sumbong sa Pangulo website for citizen whistle-blowing, and calls from groups like the Association of General and Flag Officers for an independent fact-finding body. Yet each new revelation only confirms what many Filipinos have long suspected: that a culture of impunity underwrites the nation’s political economy, where public service becomes personal enrichment.


Kitsch as Critique: Glittering Excess and Historical Residue


Kitsch art—often dismissed as manipulative and populist—finds new urgency in this corrupt milieu. Its hallmarks—overblown sentimentality, mass-market imagery, religious trinkets—mirror the flashy materialism of corrupt elites. When a ceremonial concrete river wall costs ₱55 million yet never materializes, the state’s spectacle of “infrastructure” becomes indistinguishable from the saccharine parodies of mass culture. By appropriating the very iconography of exploitation—plastic rosaries, gaudy neon plastics, commemorative souvenir plates—kitsch artists hold a mirror to the grotesque priorities of kleptocracy.


In praxis, these works collapse the distance between civic crisis and everyday culture. A series of printed banners replicating ghost-project documentation becomes a public altar for erasure; resin-encased DPWH budget line items transform into devotional icons to lost public trust. Here, kitsch is not ironic contempt but an affective corollary: it encodes resentment, disbelief, and a sardonic lament for institutions that pump borrowed funds into private vaults.


Whimsy as Resistance: Playful Reenchantment of Public Spheres


Whimsy appears an unlikely ally in the face of systemic plunder, yet it possesses a crucial edge: by invoking play, absurdity, and childlike wonder, it fractures the veneer of authoritarian gravitas. The Marcos presidency—described by critics as a “ghost presidency” reliant on PR stunts and phantom leadership—is well suited to whimsical counter-illustration. In open-air installations, cartoonish flood barriers tipped over by giant inflatable ducks satirize both engineering failure and political folly. In digital realms, meme-inspired animations reenact budget hearings as puppet shows, exposing how policy scripts are co-written by contractors and district engineers in clandestine collusion.


Such whimsical interventions do more than lampoon; they reintroduce collective agency. When audiences are invited to manipulate the oversized inflatable ducks—signifying misplaced concrete walls—they enact a form of symbolic repair. Whimsy here becomes a communal ritual of recalibration, reminding viewers that systems are not immutable ghosts but assemblages of human decisions open to reconfiguration.


Material Accumulation, Cultural Commodification, and the Art Market


The art market itself is not immune to the logic of accumulation. Prices for works employing kitsch tropes have soared at Manila galleries, often underwritten by the same network of patrons and contractors whose wealth depends on misappropriation. Ghost-project profiteers become silent investors in whimsically titled exhibitions—“Concrete Dreams,” “Flood of Fortune”—thus laundering both funds and reputations. The spectacle of a ₱3-million oil painting festooned with faux-plastic lilies echoes the absurdity of a ₱5-million commission fee for a ₱10-million multi-purpose building in Laguna, where no building ever stood.


This convergence calls for a trauma-informed critique within art institutions. Rather than merely reifying price tags as measures of success, curators and critics must interrogate provenance: Whose capital empowers these acquisitions? Which networks of graft remain hidden beneath glossy auction catalogs? Only by situating artworks within the broader political economy of corruption can the field resist becoming complicit in kleptocratic culture.


Towards a Relational Aesthetics of Accountability


In response to these entanglements, a relational aesthetics grounded in ethics of witnessing emerges as a vital alternative. Community-based workshops in Mandaluyong and Bulacan collect oral testimonies from those displaced by non-existent flood walls. These sessions produce collaborative scrolls—hand-painted timelines of broken promises, overlapping with personal narratives of loss. When exhibited, the scrolls demand viewers navigate the spatial gaps between public records and lived experience. They enact accountability not through juridical evidence alone but through shared encounter.


Simultaneously, artist-led fact-finding projects align with citizen journalists to map ghost projects using GPS-enabled drones. The resulting data visualizations—project footprints with blank interiors—function as both artistic evidence and civic toolkits. They invite collective use: community groups repurpose the visuals to file local government complaints on the Sumbong sa Pangulo platform, transforming artistic labor into acts of civic engagement.


Conclusion


The materialistic accumulation of wealth through systemic corruption in the Marcos administration has inflicted deep wounds on Philippine society. Yet in the interstices of this kleptocratic landscape, kitsch and whimsy emerge as two intertwined aesthetic strategies—one reflecting the spectacle of excess, the other invoking playful refusal. By embedding archival residue, oral histories, and citizen-sourced data into their works, artists can reframe stolen wealth not as private triumph but as public reckoning. The challenges are immense: state apparatuses of regulatory capture, media complicity, and market commodification persist. But through a relational ethics of artmaking—one that privileges accountability, community agency, and imaginative repair—Philippine art can reclaim its role as both mirror and catalyst, bearing witness to kleptocracy while forging pathways toward collective transformation.


If you like any of my concept research, writing explorations, and/or simple writings please support me by sending me a coffee treat at my paypal amielgeraldroldan.paypal.me  


Many Thanks to past coffee runs.

I appreciate each cup & enjoyed them so much.

Amiel Gerald Roldan

August 25, 2025 


I'm trying to complement my writings with helpful inputs from AI through writing. Bear with me as I am treating this blog www.amielroldan.blogspot.com as repositories, drafts and my journals.  


Please comment and tag if you like my reads, compilations and art works. 


amiel_roldan@outlook.com

amielgeraldroldan@gmail.com



If you like my concept research, writing explorations, 

and/or simple writings please support me by sending 

me a coffee treat at GCash /GXI +63 9053027965 or http://paypal.me/AmielGeraldRoldan



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ernest Concepcion

-
Image
Grip of Salvation I, II, III A Study Beyond Conceptualism for Ernest Concepcion's Art About When Filipino-American Ernest Concepcion started his works on these transmedia paintings, he started with large square formatted works as studies. He wasn't able to continue the series for an international exhibit a few years back but he was nonchalant about it and expressed more gratitude to our academic training, flexibility, discipline with ideas and concepts from a common art professor at the University. The thrust of creating your ideas through several repetitions, deconstructions, medial studies, and several workloads of hundreds of preliminaries might have brought us shared insights with the artists we really respect.  Gaining understanding & choosing to work the formatted canvas as his large palette offered more challenges to us albeit in a simple way.  For a time, Ernest Concepcion moved to Brooklyn, New York as a young emerging artist. I met him there again in 2003 while o...
Read more

ILOMOCA presents Cultural Workers: Not Creative?

-
Image
Artist Statement / Reflective Essay Amiel Gerald Roldan Cultural Workers: Not Creative? – ILOMOCA, May 16, 2025 For decades, I have committed myself to the practice of painting and artmaking—drawn to it not solely for expression, but for the quiet sustenance it gives. However, prolonged exposure to the structures, personalities, and politics behind the art world has, at times, left me jaded and distracted. I hold myself accountable for these distractions, but they were also lessons. The peripheries of art—documentation, marketing, directorship, curation, administration, facilitation, and pedagogy—have deeply informed my growth. In learning the demands of these roles, I found a sense of order and grounding amidst the turbulence. A pivotal moment in my development was the opportunity granted by the Asian Cultural Council in 2003–2004, which allowed me to work in the United States. That period served as a critical foundation for my growth as a printmaker, painter, and curator. Over the ye...
Read more

Juanito Torres

-
Image
History of the World   Immortality & the Spiral Ascent of One Juanito Torres About I met the painter and sculptor Juanito Torres in the mid 1990's, a dynamic figurative artist student then. Marveling at his outspoken personality, talent in figurations, observant singularity, unique character, and pragmatic existentialism.  And as a fellow artist student in daily struggle, we sought not only those in the academic institutions but the immensity and proportion of the applied in the real. We went to most leading galleries around and immersed ourselves in the aesthetics and patriotic debates among the norm in the Philippine art scene and the contrasting conceptual half of dissenting norms. He had a wider introduction than most to materials and theories in art early on as he belongs to the elite Makiling HS Visual Arts prior to his taking on a more formal painting course at the University. This earned him the foundation to be independent from any chartered route. Making his own ...
Read more