Thomas Kinkade's paintings might be worth more now, or something, if that means something to someone. I don't get quite as offended by it as other people, because he was basically the Andy Warhol of Middle American suburban housewives, a canny hack with a personality cult and an understanding of mass-production and appealing to what the people want.
I'm not the only one who's made this connection, to be sure. It's hard not to make the connection, the only difference merely being a mystique among a certain set of folks that could be defined by some as a target market.
Sorry Kevin Smith, I was responsible for this travesty. I hope you'll understand.
To each their own, I guess, as I roll my eyes listening to the usual suspects drone on about negativity and bleakness. Most great art has a strain of melancholy or at the very least joy shot through with some intensity of emotion, even the kinds of things that appeal to a lot of people are imbued with a more intense emotion, even in their most kitschiest.
i suffer from sentimentality-blindness but don't begrudge anyone their love of kitsch, just wish it didn't support such huge markets of disposable tchotchkes
ReplyDeleteONCE AGAIN YOU ARE TOO NEGATIVE
ReplyDeleteWHY ARE YOU ALWAYS NEGATIVE
BUY SOME PANTSUITS A SKINNY CALF AND A MOO-ILK SHAKE
I think most all Kinkade art could be improved by the addition of Godzilla and some fighter jets.
ReplyDelete~
@if: or some vampires.
ReplyDeletebut seriously: kinkade was a marketer, plain and simple. he commodified his style and mass-distributed it. prints, replicas, posters, oils. nothing original. an almost cartoonish realism, imbued with hackneyed sentimentality and faux mysticism ("light"—pah! give me Vermeer!). he made tons of money selling identical works & still somehow managed to drive up prices for his stuff—i think there was stuff he actually signed (highest value), some things he robo-signed, and some things he didn't but somehow authorized, etc. frankly, some of it looks like paint-by-numbers he could've had "people" copy for him. really remarkable how he went around the manhattan, sf, l.a. gallery scene and directly to middle-america—upscaled furniture and home decor places. buying a kinkade was not buying a one-of-a-kind, but buying into the kinkade phenomenon. 'oh, you've got to have a kinkade.' almost made you feel like you had a pollock—except more.
And so was Warhol and Dali, except that Kinkade saw the marketing potential of a demographic that wasn't necessarily into the arty-farty but liked "pretty" and sentimental. Dali had piles of signed canvases ready to go and Warhol didn't touch all of his work either (and did advertising too). I find the whole appealing to religious people thing as crass as televangelism, in part because it overshadows some pretty damn swanky religious art from the likes of Viktor Vasnetsov or more recently, Makoto Fujimura (who I met once and was a super-nice guy as well as an interesting artist).
ReplyDeleteI like your wallpaper!
ReplyDelete