Philip Francis Queeg: Bloody William: Aarontology: Yet.

OBAMA!
WHERE NORMAN ROCKWELL?
WHERE?
\o/
l
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/dunno why, but that's the first thing i thought of.

Normal Rockwell's art was actually much more relevant and, in terms of message, controversial than Kinkade ever hoped to be. It became pablum because of oversaturation of the wholesome image, but if you look into what his paintings actually meant, they're pretty amazing stories with much more heart and soul than any Kinkade painting.

Case in point

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I haven't done any research on that painting, or Rockwell, and I'm not going to, but is there a reason the figures in that painting look like they're marching in lock-step?

WhyteRaven74: Confabulat: So Republicans want to be associated with crappy hack art now. Got it. Makes a lot of sense really.

Read up on the biography of Samuel Morse, before the telegraph he was an artist. Who wanted to do nothing but spread the word of God with art. And we're not talking feel good Catholic or Episcopalian stuff here, we're talking fundamentalist evangelical stuff. The sort of stuff we see today. Oh and as for the telegraph? He saw it was a way to spread the word of God to people everywhere. In many ways the modern GOP would love Morse. Also there's the fact he didn't actually invent the telegraph apparatus and his claim to what we call Morse code is rather shaky. And no he wasn't a nice guy, didn't even have that going for him.

I read a great book about Marconi a few years back (inventor of the wireless). He wasn't a nice man, either. In fact, if you collected every negative stereotype about Italians that Northeastern Americans and other Europeans harbored in the late 19th century, Marconi probably fulfilled them all. He wasn't well educated, he didn't understand the underlying science behind his discovery, he drank too much, and he had loose hands with women. He was an untrustworthy business partner, rude in most social situations, and paranoid about everyone he interacted with (although with good reason). He also had questionable hygiene if he was engrossed in a project.

Seems to me if you're going to change even a little part of the world, you have to be an asshole.

Kittypie070: [www.ichabodsquad.net image 450x588]

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Kitty, I feel like you should have been included in the wonderful fan art that Jroo drew of sweetmelissa31 and I.

JimbobMcClan: Duke Phillips' Singing Bears: TheShavingofOccam123: JRoo: AverageJoe77: For the last time, not ALL of us in the flyover states vote Republican!

/just the rural idiots


Yeah, I'm a registered democrat and an erotic illustrator, and I live in Nebraska.

What's erotica in Nebraska like?

Images of cornpacking.

And stump busting.

And the occasional all-you-can-eat Warren Buffett.

What I like about Kinkade's paintings is that they are so idyllic, pastoral and effervescent that they feel like parody, transcending their own uplifting warmth to invert into something ironic and disturbing.

Salvador Dali would have considered Kinkade's entire body of work to be a masterpiece of sentimental absurdism.

I have to say, I'm glad this turned out to be an amazing thread despite it being about probably the worst blog on the internet. Like it's worse than that tiger pump guy's website.

FTA: "But most of all, I think Thomas Kinkade was hated because he was liked by the wrong kinds of people. He was a favorite of the loathsome Lumpenproletariat of flyover country, the people who had the bad taste to work with their hands, live in Suburbia, believe in God and vote Republican. (Kinkade himself was not shy about professing his Christian beliefs, which probably infuriated his critics all the more.) "

I'm pretty sure that's a straw man fallacy wrapped in a mind-reading fallacy and served up on a raspberry coulis of class warfare and Kristian Kultur Warz(TM).

It's an Election Year. Everything is grist to the mill of the Conservatives and Republicans while they try to split off their sheeple from the goats of "elitist" intelligentsia with what Jean-Paul Sartre called "false class consciousness" and what old coots would have called "book-larnin" and "eggheads". Slap God and Flag and a Buck and Doe on it and sell it in the boondocks.

Anybody who gets worked up over Kinkade (and I don't know any) would probably be opposed to the mass-marketing of cheap repro as "art" and the sale of the same at prices which could buy real, if minor, original works by competitent painters, sculpters, etc. Some might simply have a distaste for schmaltz and saccharine, whether in a mass-marketed warehouse piece of "art" or a one dollar Christmas card.

Kinkade was to art what "gold art coins" are to gold investing--a con job aimed at the ignorant. The investor in "collectibles", "memorabilia", "art" or "genuine gold and silver" "coins" pays a super-premium which guarantees that profit will never accrue to anybody but the promoters.

You can buy gold in many forms--bullion for delivery, bullion held in vaults for annual fees, gold mine shares, etc. The sovereignage on real gold coins (minted only by Governments) is quite high but for these "artistic" coins with no value as legal tender even, it can be 95% of the price the buyer pays. Gold would have to rise to twenty times the price paid by the sucker, er, collector before they could hope to recoup their expenditure.

The value of a Kinkade original painting might conceivably increase marginally because even a bad original is an original, but the value of a piece of machine-printed cardboard sold as "art" in warehouse sales is unlikely to exceed the value such a "painting" might fetch at a church jumble sale or a garage sale. Intrinsically, it is worth the recycle value of the paper, which is diminished by the printing of the "art" on it.

Nobody really hates Kinkade except perhaps some artists of small talent outraged by the con game of warehouse art, namely the minor talents who could be selling their work for $200, $500, $2,000 to art lovers if they weren't wasting their money and time on sentimental petit bourgeois or working class or peasant "art" reproductions sold with all the rhetoric and pomp con artists can bring to the artisitic aspirations of their gulls and marks.

Nobody gives a damn what Kinkade's religious beliefs were, anymore than the Pope gave a damn what Michelangelo's beliefs were. It's not like there is any lack of sincere religionists among artists, or great artists among religious artists. A truly great artist can do something terrible in the way of religious or political propaganda because of his or her talent, but this does not outrage anybody except maybe the odd ideologue.

Kinkade's work is simply sentimental clap trap. "Artist of light"? A lot of artists paint light and dark well, but Kinkade painted dullness, not light. If you want to see real light, try Rembrandt, Carragagio, or even the Impressionists, all of whom have large popular fan bases which include, obligatorily, the "wrong sort of people" that the author claims the elites hate.

There's plenty of light in a museum poster of Renoir or Van Gogh and you can get them framed or boarded for the same price as a piece of warehouse art or less. And there's plenty of otherwise not too brilliant or famous young or middle-aged artists who can even do schmaltz and saccharine better than Kinkade. If you want a Kozy Kot(TM) or a Bluebird of Happiness on a Twig Inc. painting, you can get them for less by going to an artisanal, not an industrial, hack.

The real cynicism, however, is not in the petty industrial exploiter, but in the intellectuals who promote and exploit it in their turn for political purposes. Religious crankery is bad enough, schmaltz and saccharine unhealthy enough, mindless patriotism and prejudice harmful enough, but some people being intellectuals and intelligent enough not to share the lamentable tastes, beliefs or prejudices of the masses, will cynically use them against the masses, especially during an election. Demagogues are the real criminals--they are second story men to a thousand con jobs. The petty con artists take a bit of money and move on to pastures and sheeple new, the second story men take your everything--pelf, freedom, life, body and soul.

And nobody laughs more heartily at the victims than these "superiors", these "sheperds" of the sheeple. They feast on roast lamb and mutton, sharing the tastes of their "enemies" more than their flocks. Con artists, like wolves, have no theory of the mind when it comes to their prey--they would find it hard to hunt and kill and eat if they were concerned about their meat.

Do you know how many great works of art the Koch Brothers own? How much Newt Gingrich spends at Tiffany's? How much Mitt Romney really loves firing people? How many hypocrites are taking a wide stance in some washroom some where? How proper a noun the eponym Santorum is?

Just to add in my pitiful two cents. . .I find the paintings WAY too busy.

Had he ever painted something that uses a fairly large block of a single color? Had he ever painted a clear blue sky? How about a luscious greenscape?

Do his paintings have a focal point?