Defend the indefensible - Thomas Kinkade

I kinda like the glowy intensity of his palatte, has kind of a 2ci vibe.

I never cared one way or the other about Thomas Kinkade (outside of knowing that my mother and grandmother liked his paintings) until I saw the 60 Minutes piece about him in 2001. His whole operation just rubbed me the wrong way.

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/20663317749/cottages

he seemed like a real shithead tbh

Sure, Thomas. Picasso may seem important now, but in 100 years your roadside shlock will be the toast of art historians who have kicked Pablo to the curb.

thomas kinkade never not called an asshole

nor has he enjoyed anything like dale chihuly's undeserved acceptance in the fine art world.

Yeah so, what did dale chihuly do to you?

Ok wow I did not know he did backgrounds for Fire and Ice

So yes, Thomas Kinkade worked with Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta on awesome animated metal fantasy.

He came on like a flame, then he turned a cold shoulder.

yeah i had no idea until i listened to an interview with bakshi a few months ago that kinkade got his start on fire and ice

apparently dude was an inveterate hustler even back then

Kinkade > Norman Rockwell. That's the best challops I can muster for this thread, other than just saying that I think all the bluster about how bad this guy was reminds me of opera buffs complaining about the fact that Kelly Clarkson can't sing.

i don't really like his paintings, but i always found it odd that so many made such a big deal out of loathing him. his paintings strongly resemble the little cast resin faerie cottages for sale in gift shops everywhere, and no one seems to harbor any special hatred for those. nor has he enjoyed anything like dale chihuly's undeserved acceptance in the fine art world. his work is pretty, quaint, comforting, completely unpretentious, distinctive & well-executed, pretty much entirely vacant, and undeniably kitschy. not my thing, but nothing to which i feel the need to object strenuously.

― preternatural concepts concerning variances in sound and texture (contenderizer), Sunday, April 8, 2012 8:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or basically this. I mean I don't know anything about Dale Chihuly, but artists who make empty, cynical, kitschy garbage with the right pretensions get their works into the homes of Persons of Wealth and Taste all the time, and Kinkade just seems to be aiming at the wrong class.

calling kinkade better than rockwell betrays either a real lack of knowledge of rockwell's work or just i dunno what because rockwell DESTROYS kinkade on pretty much every level
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqrqj9gvW11qde9vzo1_500.jpg
So this looks basically like suicide of either the unintentional or intentional variety, huh?

yeah no you're right. I knew that wasn't true when I posted it. I still like that Daytona 500 painting though!

Anyone read anything in Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall by any chance?

Cloth: $94.95 - In Stock
loluniversitypress

Is it OK to hate Kinkade if I also hate art certain art stars like Koons?

Rolling my eyes at this wierd defense of Kinkade from class solidarity POV.

FWIW it has been my experience that defenders of Kinkade often embrace Koons, etc.

PS I like Rockwell

fwiw I think Hirst is a better high art analog for Kinkade than Koons

Thing I always had about the guy is that his stuff was bleah and annoying but ultimately to be disregarded as just another stupid irrevelant thing that the world throws at you over the course of the day, but when you actually start finding out more about how the guy ran his business and the mentality he deliberately helped spread and reinforce that he becomes increasingly excreable.

Also, Oneal's obit is great:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/rip-thomas-kinkade-painter-of-light-and-moral-arti,72079/

Kinkade’s conversion to being a born-again Christian was, in Kinkade’s frequent retelling, the origin of the sea change in his career, which had truly begun with Kinkade working with Dinotopia creator James Gurney on the bestselling The Artist’s Guide To Sketching before contributing backgrounds to Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta’s Fire And Ice. His spiritual awakening also led to his smartest business move: Positioning himself as an opponent to the elitism of fine art, Kinkade rejected the entire gallery system and instead began focusing on retail distribution in shopping malls, as well as creating inexpensive prints and other mass-market copies of his work that could be produced by assistants, like a Wal-Mart version of Andy Warhol. Kinkade saw his factory-inspired creative process as part of the overall mission to bring his messages of peace and pastel beauty to as many millions of people as he could—and as he himself put it, to give them “art they can understand.”
Not surprisingly, that mission—and implicit suggestion that his audience is stupid—has often been derided by art critics who see no inherent value in producing such mail-order mediocrity, creating works seemingly expressly intended to adorn cheap drugstore calendars, and striving for nothing besides producing inoffensive kitsch. But Kinkade definitely saw the value, to the tune of approximately $100 million in annual revenue—and, by Kinkade’s estimation, being the most collected artist in America. Such widespread popular support certainly made it easy to dismiss the tongue-clucking of art snobs who turned up their noses at Kinkade, and it goes without saying that Kinkade’s untold millions of fans couldn’t care less about such opinions either, wanting only the warm and comforting familiarity (with a dash of moral righteousness and patriotism) that Kinkade so ably provided.
Of course, it was slightly harder for Kinkade to dismiss the numerous lawsuits and FBI investigations that accused him of underhanded business practices, many stemming from the owners of his Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises. Over the years, Kinkade’s company was forced to answer to numerous allegations that he’d defrauded authorized Kinkade dealers—and most damning of all, by exploiting their Christianity to present their getting into the Kinkade business as a “religious opportunity,” then conning them into taking on unreasonable, unsellable quantities of Kinkade’s work at fixed prices on pure faith. Most of these owners claimed Kinkade had ruined them financially “in the name of God”—a series of accusations that Kinkade dismissed as a “smear campaign” (with no trace of irony), despite also settling some of them...

hmm

worth defending strictly for the Bakshi stuff imho

The amount of candy-coating in the average Kinkade painting is about two inches thick, compared to a light sheen of added sweetness in a Rockwell.

I like Kinkade for a number of reasons. One is his paintings are pretty mystical and have that light to it, it's a bit like that feeling I got when visiting my great grandparents in Florida as a kid. Their apartment was all yellows and whites and brass and light colors where the house I grew up in was mostly 80's brown and burgundy shag rugs wood paneling and stuff. It's a bit like shoegaze or glow-fi or whatever that term is, soft-focus nostalgia wrapped up in popular mysticism.

I also like the outlandish stories I hear about him. That story about him pissing on Winnie the Pooh is like, he's the Mick Jagger of Disneyland or something.

It's funny that most obits that consider the critical stance point out that his 'pedestrian' audience buys his paintings solely because they look pretty and make them feel warm and comforting. 1) Why on Earth is this a bad thing? 2) Aren't superficial considerations like physical appearance and emotional resonance at the core of most (non-collector/gallery) art purchases?

I'd like to see Christmas Cottage. I have a feeling I'd probably enjoy it in the same way as Opfergang or The Flower Girl.

Christmas COttage is defs worth watching because it's bonkers, and surprisingly kind of trashy.

I can't hate Thomas Kinkade – without him, the world would never have had "The Christmas Cottage," his insanely bad/entertaining Christmas/biopic movie. I just imagined, in every seen, the director yelling at Peter O'Toole, "Dodder harder! You're 76, I know you have more doddering in you!" He dodders so hardcore.

― breaking that little dog's heart chakra (Abbott), Sunday, June 6, 2010 11:54 PM (Yesterday

It's like one of those movie where a respected old actor turns a deranged performance in a forgotten piece of trash, and then they suddenly die and it's their last movie. Except I looked it up and O'Toole kept living.

It's funny that most obits that consider the critical stance point out that his 'pedestrian' audience buys his paintings solely because they look pretty and make them feel warm and comforting. 1) Why on Earth is this a bad thing? 2) Aren't superficial considerations like physical appearance and emotional resonance at the core of most (non-collector/gallery) art purchases?

it's a bad thing because they are probably bad people and things that make bad people happy are bad

I guess that's an argument against contemporary art too tho

Why are they bad people?

I guess some of the commentaries imply that people buy his art because they are being convinced that it is an *investment*, which is bad. Reminds me of those collectors' plates infomercials ("some plates may go up in value, others may go down")

That's exactly what it's like. Mass marketed collector plates!

some crossover there for real

http://img1.etsystatic.com/il_fullxfull.232616317.jpg

Currently going for $19.99 on etsy

THOMAS KINKADE...do I really need to say more? He is the most incredible painter of our generation and now he is gone.
Here we have one of his full size collector's plates.
It measures approx. 8 1/2"

I'd buy it just to have a dog shit on it.

It's not too different from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XODJyE2ucfo

FWIW it has been my experience that defenders of Kinkade often embrace Koons, etc.

i'm not really defending kincade, just saying that the vocal hatred of his work from some quarters seems overblown and a little silly. koons is sometimes funny (how could you not love a giant chrome bunny?), but not terribly interesting outside that. more than anything else, he's a milemarker in the ongoing vampiric exploitation of warhol's ideas & legacy. rockwell and warhol tower over all of these simps.

Obviously it all depends on your stance about what art is supposed to do, and what definition of art you're using, but it's really not hard to see why things that make people feel warm feel and comfortable might be problematic to anyone skeptical of postmodern consumer culture's greatest excesses. Plus, people aren't supposed to like easy art, what with its subjecting of the masses to politically passive consumer positions, 'n all that. Also: the militant commodification of nostalgic visions, wrapped up in particular conservative worldviews.

I think the defense of Kinkade on solely formal grounds, might actually be a kind of an interesting discussion, if not a perhaps implausable one, at least given his status as a social phenomenon, more than anything you can already find on flickr, or just do yourself by scanning a calendar and putting the right photoshop effects on it.

But let us not continue to speak ill of the dea, but rather remember him as he was:

In 2006 John Dandois, Media Arts Group executive, recounted a story that on one occasion Kinkade became drunk at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas and began shouting "Codpiece! Codpiece!" at the performers. Eventually he was calmed by his mother.

(totally redeems him, by the way)

My intense dislike of Kinkade has very little to do with the warm and comfortable subject matter of his paintings. It's how he turned himself into an industry in the most manipulative ways, playing on faith and people's desire to have an heirloom that's worth some money in the future (which, I'm pretty sure, will NOT be the case with any Kinkade reproduction). Also, he was a drunk asshole.

lol @ kinkade apologism; you ppl are insane

or EDB otm

ime people dog on rockwell b/c he is lol naive and quaint, and kinkade b/c he is lol lowbrow; both of them are 'unsophisticated.' for my money kinkade is actually terrible.

Don't forget, above and beyond everything else, TK was a businessman, an extremely tactful one at that. The man knew how to sell people what they want, and how to make them want what he sells.

people buy his art because they are being convinced that it is an *investment*, which is bad

Is this different than the fine art world?

Yes.

Fine art is totally hit or miss, but Kinkade reproductions/prints/whatever are ALL MISS.

not really all that different from certain aspects of fine art, no.

kinkade belongs in the leroy neiman camp rather than the koons camp but the same reek of cynicism under all the perfume wafts pretty clearly from both camps.

I think what's missing from the discussion here is, what is it that takes the place of a Kinkade in the home of a more intellectual, discerning customer or otherwise patron of the arts? Holding him up against serious fine artists kind of feels cheap, they're working in different venues or something. In the words of It's Always Sunny, "What is this versus?"

I don't know, my parents have the odd Impressionist prints and mom DIY-decorates the walls with stencils and paint and stuff. My friends all either have their friends' local hipster art hanging up, or meticulously retro themed stuff curated from thrift stores. One time I knew a rich girl whose parents had lots of fine art, including a Matisse that was just randomly hanging in the bathroom.

people buy his art because they are being convinced that it is an *investment*, which is bad

Is this different than the fine art world?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, April 9, 2012 4:59 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not like this isn't an enormous problem for fine art either.