So let me make sure I've got this one:

Thomas Kincaid is popular so the liberals hate him and wish all his work could be replaced with Andres Cerrano and it's proof that popular culture is all about freedom-loving Jesus-adoring Republicans, BUT every other piece of pop culture that's popular is worthless because it's forged at Satan's Anvil -- Hollywood -- where the America-hating entertainment industry prevents real Americans from getting to watch what they want and it's not about how many tickets you sell because Crying Eagle F-150 BUT Fox News is #1 so that means Fox News is the best, most accuratest news around?

Should I be bleeding from all my head holes? Because I am.

I went to college for art, and I saw a lot of different stuff and heard many perspectives about what art should be, but it always came down to personal taste in the end. Nobody can dictate to anybody what art is or is supposed to be. That's why Duchampe put a urinal in an exhibit. He was giving a big "F*ck you," to the art world. Thomas Kinkade was a highly successful commercial artist who knew what a lot of people wanted to see, and he developed a style which could meet a demand. Yeah, it's grandma art. Big deal. There are literally millions of other artists you can spend your time collecting if you don't like Kinkade's stuff.

/Feels this same way about books, movies, music and the rest.
//Don't like it? Not your problem. Go find something you do like.

Really?

Politicizing sort of bland art?

He didn't break a lot of new ground, he was a capable sort with light and, and he had a love for soft textures and all of his paintings looked sort of like they were painted with a blur filter, which was deliberate.

He sold a lot of prints, he made money. Good on him.

Was he a great artist? In the sense that he will be remembered in a hundred years? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that I hate him? I recognize the medium and its limitations. That folks are trying to latch onto this as a political issue is sort of sad...

Eh... Technically, he was a talented painter, I guess, but he painted cheesy couch art with no substance.

It was uninspired tripe made for mass consumption. The reality TV of the art world, if you will.

Hey, Lar?

/your blog blows goats

Did somebody really bother to hate Kinkade, or is this another paranoid victim of his own imagination?

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?

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.

Jackson Herring: ok well melissa would definitely be a cat (white of course) and you can draw me as whatever animal has like the biggest penis or the rock hardest abs or the most radical skateboard tricks

Lifted from Wiki:

Heh. I learned about the lumpenproletariat in highschool.

According to Marx, the lumpenproletariat had no special motive for participating in revolution, and might in fact have an interest in preserving the current class structure, because the members of the lumpenproletariat usually depend on the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy for their day-to-day existence. In that sense, Marx saw the lumpenproletariat as a counter-revolutionary force.

You may know them as teapartiers and authoritarians. (new window)

If this isn't pure unbridled talent, I simply do not know what is

No one hates Thomas Kinkaid. Its like hating Dan Brown or elevator music. Its not good or bad, it's just...there.

Note, I did not write this:

The reason the art world doesn't love Kinkade isn't that it hates love, life, goodness, or God. We may be silly or soulless or whatever, but we don't automatically hate things with faith and love or that other people love. We're not sociopaths. (Well, most of us aren't.) The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliché and already told. This is why Kinkade's pictures strike those in the art world as either prepackaged, ersatz, contrived, or cynical. Unoriginal rote things done in his perfectly conventional, balanced people-pleasing way produced these confected conglomerations of things people wanted to think they wanted to think about, democratic paintings whose meanings are hidden from no one, whose appeal is to not to vex or disturb, to produce doubt or newness. As Kinkade said, "I work to create images that project a serene simplicity that can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone." Joan Didion wrote that Kinkade's pictures "typically feature a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."

I kind of put him in the same camp of artists as Robert Bateman. Wickedly skilled, but doesn't really paint anything beyond really neat looking illustrations that are turned into money by selling photocopies of the originals.

At the risk of sounding more hipster than thou, the best artists tend to be the mentally ill people the world will likely never hear about.

That' and people who draw hentai, of course.

How it could be called "art" behooves me in the first place. Art has to challenge you, make you think. What he did just re-enforced their backwoods beliefs. Mass produced, mundane garbage. If I see one of his pos prints in a house, I know instantly the the owners are simple minded hillbillies.

I hated his paintings because they were crap. If syrupy sentamentalism and cotton candy could paint, they would look like Thomas Kincaid paintings.

This is the stuff we call manufactured persecution so they can justify persecuting those other people back, first.

/You can tell it's fake when it is always the same usual suspects, it's a very broad group and they happen to know exactly who it is without any demographic studies.

DarnoKonrad: jbc: How many songs does the world need about a homely chick being dumped?

Are you familiar with the entire genera devoted to being dumped called 'country and western?'

The keyword being homely. Shania Twain proved long ago C&W is more about looks than actual talent.

logophile: it was hated art for the same reason everything else ends up hated: overexposure. they took an arguably 'neato' style and put it everywhere from fridge magnets to sweatshirts. it was hated because it went from hard-to-acquire originals to "i picked up a framed 200 dollar signed print from Tuesday Morning for 100!" it became food for the masses. and the avant garde HATES food for the masses.

Adele is a good example of how to say "fark you" to the machine. come out rocking, be enjoyed and adored.. then pull the fark back and get the hell out of dodge and disappear for a couple years.

always keep the demand exceeding the supply. the quickest way to 'ruin' anything is to make it available to everyone.

Adele is at least as annoying as Kinkade. How many songs does the world need about a homely chick being dumped?

Lawrence Person gets my coveted Crying Eagle 9/11 Award for the week for exposing the hatred of the left and their insatiable effort to kill, with their words, this heroic painter-patriot.

You bi-coastal elitist liberals can have your fancy hamburgers and your belled-bottomed trousers, we here in the heartland are perfectly happy with our inspirational joyscapes and our diecast whimsies.

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

DarnoKonrad: James!: I hope this causes a surge of Tomas Kinkade purchases to "stick it to the libs".

Sales Of Kinkade Artwork Surge (new window)

HAHA, Ah, to the malls! Eat burgers made from meat slurry and purchase crappy paintings or the libs will win!

I hope this causes a surge of Tomas Kinkade purchases to "stick it to the libs".