Defend the indefensible - Thomas Kinkade

that is not a raspberry beret

no way

that's um...a placenta beret

kinkade's work is art because both he and its admirers consider it art.

That's where we disagree. I think Kinkade figured his work was bullshit for a bunch of rubes and that he was working a con on them, not selling them art.

agree with remy's chart, except that a 2010 tokyo disney shirt seems like a good move to me. of course it depends on who's wearing it...

remy's chart suggests that the main difference between art and not-art is mechanical reproduction. i'm not sure i buy this completely, but i understand it. by this measure, art is the human act of making art and also the direct physical document of that creative act (the "artwork"). this can involve mechanical processes, but by the time a work is being mass produced, it has ceased to be "art" in itself. it's probably better described at that point as a representation of art.

problem with this is that there's little ontological difference between one of a run of 10 prints and one of a run of a million. and most people seem to accept limited runs of prints of cast sculptures or w/e as "proper art". which kind of breaks the distinction down, imo.

I think Kinkade figured his work was bullshit for a bunch of rubes and that he was working a con on them, not selling them art.

maybe, but i think that's too simple. from the few intereviews i've seen/read, i think he respected the shit out of his own talents and had (a perhaps envious) contempt for fine art as a shell game.

what's really missing from kinkades to call them art? he's created a worldview within the confines of the frame and invites his audience to enter. it's just a terrible, terrible worldview of false nostalgia, and a contempt for nature disguised as reverence.

re merdeyeux, some of kinkade's fans seem to be very serious about the "real art" value of his work, and the same sorts of dismissals were long lobbed at "mere illustrators" like norman rockwell and n.c. wyeth.

remy's chart doesn't speak so much to mechanical reproduction but authorial presence. at least i think it does.

a terrible, terrible worldview of false nostalgia, and a contempt for nature disguised as reverence.

nostalgia is always false, and kinkaid's "cottage" paintings (the reason he became a kitsch-star) are not about nature but the idea of home. nostalgia for home is by no means "false", even if the home longed for was never real.

Dude deliberately fucked over people who ran the franchises bearing his name and told them it was to the Greater Good. He was Sarah Palin thru different product marketing channels.

His ethical and political sins I have a greater problem than the aesthetic shit he manufactured.

I feel like the main difference between Kinkade and Hirst is that Kinkade is giving you a warm smile with his fingers crosseed behind hsi back and Hirst is giving you a "we're both in the know" smirk with his fingers crossed behind his back.

xp to contenderizer

Any good con man respects his own talents, since they are rare and hard won. The fact that he saw fine art as yet another con game tends to reinforce that he viewed his own game as the same kind of con, unfairly accorded less respect. Which definitely says things about how he viewed his products and his customers.

remy's chart doesn't speak so much to mechanical reproduction but authorial presence. at least i think it does.

yeah, that too, i suppose. the auteur theory of art in general. i see remay as drawing a distinction between mechanical reproduction and creator-as-author in the acceptance of animation cells (drawn by skilled human hands, but not really "authored" by those hands in the same sense that disney's original mickey was) coupled w the rejection of mass produced posters and t-shirts.

yeah, agree w aimless there. agree too w kingfish's critique of kinkade's venality. i'm separating all that from "the work itself", cuz i don't think it has much to do with whether or not the work is or isn't art. i mean, i think of most human activity as having at least some art component.

is nostalgia always false? i think you can have an accurate longing for say, the taste of a taco bell taco, and have it confirmed that it does indeed taste as you remember it. kinkade's tacos are a kind of revisionism comfort food that conservatives can indulge in, like, say, the 1950s scenes in back to the future that Reagan enjoyed so much, and i guess i like hill valley, 1955 better than kinkade's brightness tacos, because it at least acknowledges racism existed or something.

well I think the stuff about Christmas Cottage makes it pretty clear that Kinkade is claiming to be selling a fantasy ideal, not nostalgia.

Christmas COttage is riddled with overwrought monologues about the POWER of ART

is nostalgia always false?

nostalgia is always a feeling. a feeling is neither true nor false. therefore, when a feeling persuades you of a truth, it is just as likely to mislead you as not.

nostalgia for home is by no means "false", even if the home longed for was never real.

You say this as if affect (no less of affect such as nostalgia that is pervasively simulated within contemporary consumer culture) is not easily manipulable for the purposes of economic exploitation.

that's a fair question. i think nostalgia is the emotional process by which accurate memory is sentimentalized and thus made false. it's a product of the human tendency to locate a sense of something "best" and "lost" in the past and to attach great poignancy that lost best thing, fuzzing its details so that it can glow more brightly, pushing aside any complexities that might dim its light. as i see it, to remember something fondly but accurately is not to engage in nostalgia. nostalgia is memory softened, simplified and buffed to an impossible, tear-jerking shine.

You say this as if affect (no less of affect such as nostalgia that is pervasively simulated within contemporary consumer culture) is not easily manipulable for the purposes of economic exploitation.

the control of affect is manipulation, regardless of the end it seeks (economic, aesthetic, political, narrative, etc). i wouldn't call this "false" regardless of the intent. if a lie is being told, that's false, but i don't see kinkade's work as a lie, even if he didn't "believe in it" himself. his salesmanship may have been duplicitous, but that's a different issue.

Has any U.S. person ever lived in a home that looked like one of those cottages? I don't see how something that doesn't exist and that you never lived in can inculcate a feeling of nostalgia for home. Esp. since Kinkade cottages been reproduced in tiny ceramic form so many times. They don't read as "homes" to me. Though I can see why Kinkade would prefer them as a subject than something that would actually give me childhood nostalgia, eg a duplex with brown carpet and a small TV.

Kinkade is claiming to be selling a fantasy ideal, not nostalgia.

these things are by no means incompatible

Getting serious Watchmen flashbacks:

http://images.wikia.com/watchmen/images/0/0f/Nostalgia.jpg

Everybody wants to go to Heaven.

I don't see how something that doesn't exist and that you never lived in can inculcate a feeling of nostalgia for home.

because "lost home" is an ideal, a fantasy, and our ideas of what home is (or more importantly "should be") arise from more than just our physical environment. again, i think kinkade's paintings evoke not just home but "lost home", a deeply nostalgic ideal that can't by it's very nature be too directly similar to anything that currently exists. if it could be found, it wouldn't be so poignantly lost.

i'm not sure what the distinction is between calling it false nostalgia or a truth-independent feeling, but i'd definitely say kinkade and his audience conspire to willfully mislead themselves using the power of nostalgia. like if he were a futurist, kinkade's paintings would be full of happy penguins driving hummers with bumper stickers saying "global warming proved false in 2025"

i mean, that should be the lol-art title of all of kinkade's cottage paintings: "lost #217", etc.

My chart was just intended to show how exclusivity/'origin' play into desirability and value of art. Quantity, intent, provenance, reproducibility, artistic integrity, cultural cachet, etc., are all implicated...

You know why I am not feeling this line of reasoning: it is because cookies live in all those little houses, not people. Empirical evidence:

http://bonanzleimages.s3.amazonaws.com/afu/images/0486/1961/100_5125__640x360_.jpg

i don't see kinkade's work as a lie

hmmm. When a person consistently says based only upon what he thinks people want to hear, then any truth he tells is accidental and unintentional. For me, having no intention to tell the truth is functionally indistinguishable from lying.

i'm not sure what the distinction is between calling it false nostalgia or a truth-independent feeling, but i'd definitely say kinkade and his audience conspire to willfully mislead themselves using the power of nostalgia.

i would say that kindade's paintings provide a sense of homelike comfort, and that this nostalgic comfort is prized by many. there is nothing necessarily misleading in it, so long as it's taken for what it is. i'm sure we all have at least a few objects in our homes that do little but provide a dose of conceptual comfort.

When a person consistently says based only upon what he thinks people want to hear, then any truth he tells is accidental and unintentional. For me, having no intention to tell the truth is functionally indistinguishable from lying.

art doesn't work that way. it's like emotion, it doesn't have to be true or false. at some point, the creator's intent doesn't even matter. all that really matters (to us), is what we take from it, and that can't ever be "false".

You know why I am not feeling this line of reasoning: it is because cookies live in all those little houses, not people.

cookies are the perfection of people

Especially if it is primarily a decorative/expressive type of art

just to be clear: i don't much care for thomas kinkade's paintings. i admire the technique and get the appeal, but the aesthetic repulses me and they're dull as dirt.

I admire his motes and crepuscules. He has technique?

Kinkade's stuff seems a little more insidious to me than conceptual comfort. Cookie houses notwithstanding, I'd really compare it to a pro-ana blog in terms of aspirational creepiness.

Will Michael Bay get this challopy re-appraisal when he dies

Like a blues band playing Aretha covers in a Days Inn lounge, made up of retired Suzuki teachers is Thomas Kinkade.

at some point, the creator's intent doesn't even matter. all that really matters (to us), is what we take from it, and that can't ever be "false".

I somewhat agree with this, but I notice that ime it is rare for anyone to make something that is still valued for 'what we take from it', long after the creator and the era of its creation have disappeared, unless the creator also strove to externalize a thought or feeling he or she personally valued and thought worthy of their best efforts. The lesser niches of nostalgia and bumfluff are easily filled by newer and shinier excrescences, and the older stuff loses its shine and is discarded. So, in this sense, the creator's intent does matter.

I'm w contenderizer here on most points.

As for what is false, externalized feelings, etc. I really don't buy any of that. Art is SUPPOSED to be false. If not, it may as well be scientific reproductions of things.

Also, i seem to recall some challopsy reviews of Transformers 2 that said they were like avant garde art or something.

xp "Kincade's tacos"

I admire his motes and crepuscules. He has technique?

if you think he doesn't, try painting one of those cottages, or a god-mickey or w/e. it's not something anyone can easily do. i'd say that kinkade has good skills and a lot of technical facility. nothing mind-blowing, but definitely respectable.

also, there's a long and well-respected tradition in art of paintings of soothing, inspirational, admirable or just plain pleasant subjects. ships at sea, horses, still-lifes, landscapes, hunting dogs, manor houses, village scenes, flower gardens, etc. paintings of this sort lost a great deal of their art-cachet in the 20th century, but people rarely try to claim that this sort of thing isn't art at all.

cookies are the perfection of people

fuckin truth bomb here

i mean, as far as sincerity of creative intent goes, i'm sure that a lot of 18th and 19th century portrait painters hated their wealthy patrons and would have preferred almost anything to the endless hours spent making sure they looked slender and attractive yet enough like themselves not to induce public snickering.

Can the intellectuals who have apotheosized the strip malls be wrong? Can the millions who have purchased a Thomas Kinkade of one sort or another be deluded? I see no reason why this cannot be the case. The point of democracy is not that the majority is correct, although that is a thought that never seems to be very far from the thinking of many of the contributors to Boylan’s book. My own feeling, after contemplating the Kinkade industry, is that, so far as the Painter of Light is concerned, we are all a bunch of Winnie the Poohs and he has urinated on us all.

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/thomas-kinkade

lol

Also, i seem to recall some challopsy reviews of Transformers 2 that said they were like avant garde art or something.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, April 9, 2012 7:46 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Armond White doesn't count

the essay by michael bay's film school teacher in the intro to criterion edition of armageddon is pretty convincing that bay is an... artist.