I Hate that Mothefucking Cocksucker Thomas Kinkade & Refuse to Pretend Otherwise

The BBQ Pit
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I’m gonna go out on a limb here, and say that I don’t mind if people LIKE Kinkade. Art is to a great extent, subjective, and if someone sees a painting that catches one’s eye, for the colors, or it reminds them of something, well, whatever. If they plain old fashioned like it, fine.

However, Thomas Kinkade is an ass of the highest quality. It’s like, he makes statements suggesting that he is right up there with Rockwell and Warhol, and saying, “I’m the Painter of Light, I’m inspired by God, I’m God’s gift to art”-well, maybe that’s just a wee bit pompous, no?

He sells PRINTS at prices that would be high for ORIGINALS. He wants his cake and to eat it too. He wants MONEY MONEY MONEY, but at the same time, calls himself a serious, ARTIST. Now, yes, artists can make money. Nothing wrong with that.

However, number one, he isn’t very good. He’s mediocre, and his paintings all look the same to me. He isn’t very good at lighting, shading, highlighting, there’s nothing really interesting, etc.

If that’s how he wants to paint, fine. But to say he’s the next Rembrandt? And painting himself as this serious man of God and religion and all that-it’s all so icky.

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fessie, I’ll try to make this breif. Maybe I’m not crystal clear, as English is my second language.

When I say that culture must survive on its own merits, I mean, that it shouldn’t receive any support, whatsoever, that the public is not prepared to pay for it. I, as a writer, hate the fact that there are people out there, doing what some few politicians regard as art, and getting their paycheck from taxmoney. There are groups, setting up plays, that never sell a single ticket, yet they conntinue to get funds from public means.

The Swedish Art Council, while grumbling, admitted a few years ago, that the biggest factor for putting what they call ‘good’ art, in people’s homes, was IKEA. They sell cheap prints and cheap frames, and, according to the council here. A print of Picasso is better than an origibnal by someone like Kinkade.
Ikea, of course, didn’t receive any public funding for this and the company’s aim was clearly to make money.
Maybe I’m clouding my own argument here, and maybe it’s part of growing up in a very leftist society (Sweden during the 60’s and 70’s).

To answer some more stuff. I know Stephen King is well read. However, he’s not material for a Nobel Prize.

Also, in a way, I do prefer tabula rasa, as you so intellectually put it. Nobody told me what to read, when I was a kid. The school library told me what not to read, by removing those books from the shelves, saying it was crappy literature. Among those books were The Hardy Boys, anything by Enid Blyton (is she known in the US?) and “Alfred Hitchcock and three…” I bought them instead. And I’ve tried to read them as a grown up. It really is crappy literature. But when I was nine or ten years old, it didn’t matter. What mattered was plot and excitement. When I was tweleve, I started on Agatha Christie and Alaistair MacLean. By 16 I was onto stuff like Graham Greene and John Irving. No one told me what to read. I had to figure it out for myself. To this day, I read somewhere between 70 and 100 new books a year.
But I hated the classes on literature in High School.

I don’t like Hemmingway or Steinbeck. I think they are overrated, and no amount of aducation or critics is going to change my mind. When I say that YMMV, I mean that you seem to think that forcefeeding art to the public, will increase the awareness. The milage varies, because I don’t think so. Anyone who wants to learn more about art or music or books or movies can take a class, search the Internet, buy a book, find a tutor, whatever. It’s there for the taking, by those who are interested.

I can hear your reply: “But then you agree that schools should teach these things?” Yes. But attendence should be volontary. If no one signs up, the students are not to be blamed. Cancel the damned thing, find a teacher with a bigger appeal, change how the class is taught, whatever. Forcing kids (or grown ups) to sit and listen to something they think is boring, is a sure way of killing the interest.

And mainly: I don’t want to be told what I’m supposed to read into a book or see in a painting. I found the eye in Guernica by myself, when I went to see it*, and felt such joy at my own discovery. It wouldn’t have been half as much fun, had a tour guide pointed the thing out, to me.

Because art, to be art for me, needs to communicate, to tell me something, to touch emotions. It’s not something to analyze or be cerebral about. If it doesn’t hit me in the gut or make me cringe or makes me sad, happy, angry or whatever, it’s just mental excersize. And in the long run, not very interesting.
That’s why I like Goya (which I linked to earlier). Those paintings fucking scare me.

So someone gets all weepy-eyed from looking at one of Kinkade’s pictures. Are you going to deny them that feeling? On the grounds that his art is crappy? Are you gonna go home to them with a print of a Van Gogh and say: “Isn’t this much nicer?” And if they say no, are you going to tell them they have to go to art class, to (fucking)learn to like it?

We’ll never agree, and I know I can’t convince you. I can only hope I can make some people who read this thread see how condescending you are, even if they, like I, think that Kinkade’s pictures are crap.

*Do you know what happened at Guernica? It was when I read about the events there, that I decided to to to Madrid and see the painting. I had seen prints and photos, of course and never really thought much about it, but from reading about what happened and then seeing the picture live - it just blew me away.

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Yes, I read tons of Nancy Drew when I was 8-10. Frankly I still really like some of Stephen King’s work, altho I agree he’s not in line for the Nobel (but I suspect he will still be remembered down the road, I love his descriptions of the 1970s). It’s wonderful to hear your experience of Guernica. And I love the cheap prints at Ikea.

What I think is sad is: We can agree that Nandy Drew/Hardy Boys is crappy literature but we’re glad we read it as kids b/c it kept us reading and met our needs at the time - and we can’t have that same conversation about art without it becoming an issue of “taste”. And without you accusing me of being condescending and elitist. What does that say about art education? How are art and literature different?

Actually I can answer that one myself - because art “isn’t for everyone”, as is often stated in fine art circles, and the people who market it want to keep it that way. Helps boost prices, adds to the mysterious air. But it’s a lie. And some of the high-end stuff that’s being offered in the trendy galleries is shit; the emperor has no clothes. We probably won’t agree on who.

We can certainly agree to disagree; please note, for the record, that I never made any statements for or against public funding for art, experimental art, theatre shows that are not well attended, or shoving anything down anyone’s throat. I think you assume I prefer avante garde work designed to alienate people - how do you know I wasn’t hoping people would find the High Renaissance section? One of the first things you learn in art history is that there is no “progress” in art.

My argument is that there is a way of understanding art, a set of rules similar to English grammar that sets the basis for visual communication. People will have their own distinctions between “good” “really good” and “really really good”, but at the very least it’s possible to separate the competent from incompetent work. Everyone is entitled to know those things. And if they did know, Kinkade would be laughed out of the mall galleries in a flash.

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I don’t think he’s any better than the other artists in his style, but I am immensely fond of that style.

That said, the posters have a point with regards to cultural imperialism as practised by the preponderance of TK outlets in malls. I want choice in art and music, and having the same glurge in every mall in america just doesnt feel right to me, whether its another store filled with only Madonna* clones of music, or a TK “art” gallery.

*now, I dont particularly hate Madonna’s music (it’s bad, but not hateably bad), but like TK ,she is a panderer of the highest order. Not a sellout, mind you, because to do that you need to have once had artistic integrity…

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:slight_smile:
[steps down from soapbox]

For the record, fessie, my first post was not directed to you. You want to do a pit rant - it’s fine by me. I’ve done them too. I have my preferences for art, music, books. There are writers, musicians, painters I hate. I was mildly amused when I started reading, but after I while, I just got fed up. It has nothing to do with any individual poster. It’s just that I’ve seen these threads soooo many times, where people do drive-by’s and just pile on. I guess it cements some kind of relationship within this group of people, where most are very well read and educated.
However, having made a living, up till a year ago, in radio, has changed some perspectives. I not only hate the wailing of Mariah Carey, I absolutely loathe it. The station I worked for has played ‘Hero’ with her some 6000 times since it came out about ten years ago. It got to the point where I cannot even listen to any radio anymore.

But we kept getting requests for the damned song, even though we played it so often. People calling in, sending e-mail, telling us about how it was the best song ever made, how they got together with their SO’s while dancing to it ASF.
I got free tickets to see Savage Garden. We were doing something at the arena, and I walked in to see them. Mostly women in the audience, aged 20-40. To me, it’s OK popmusic. If it’s on in the background, it wouldn’t really bother me. But I would never buy an album or even download a song. Yet, about half of the 8.000 people in the audience was singing along with every song.
We used focus groups to find out what songs to play. I once went there, as part of the group, to see what actually happened. We who worked there, always tried to find new and exciting songs, as well as good oldies, that haven’t been played to death.
So I sat in the back, glancing at the guys next to me and checking reactions. I had argued that we should try ‘Tempted’ by Squeeze. One of my all time fav’s from the 80’s. A good oldie, IMO. A song that would fit in the mix.
The song comes. Nobody’s moving. The people next to me give it an abyssmal score. Recognition is very low. Next is ‘I just called to say I love you’. Heads bobbing. Feet tapping the rythm. 100% recognition and top scores.

I’m straying wildly here, but I just wanted to give you this as a background. I have a hard time saying that the people who prefered Stevie Wonder are idiots. By listening to the station, because we played a song they really like, they were paying my wages.
Does it make me a sell-out? I suppose. I got out, not because of that, but because I realized I wanted to do something else, mainly writing.

So, peace, fessie. I know how you feel, and I sympathise. However, experience has taught me to take a step back and try to look at these things from another angle. If nothing else, it might give me a hint on how to break down the thing that’s annoying me.

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Heir apparent to Warhol? Omifuckingawdihatethisstupidprick. I don’t even have words for how very fucking wrong that is.

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warhol is okay,

but I don’t see how you connect him and TK

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IANOART connisewer, but now I’ll always remember the name “Thomas Kincade” Sure hope you didn’t do him any unintenional favors.

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Peace back atcha, Gaspode. I appreciate the tricky lines we’re all walking re: things we treasure, making a living, selling out our principles, and striving for some common ground. And it’s so interesting how these posts bring up other issues for people, making it impossible to really stay “on topic” but much more interesting & worthwhile for the detours.

Actually I learned a lot from our discourse. And I gotta give you credit for being able to argue in a second language, something I could never do - when I was in Germany many years ago I was trying to figure out who the famous “Ein Bahn” was, since there were so many streets named after him, “Ein Bahn StraBe” in every town, I figured he was the German Martin Luther King Jr. (turns out it means “one way”).

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:stuck_out_tongue:
That’s very funny. Very funny indeed.
The German Martin Luther King Jr.?
:smiley:

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I went to Germany about eight years ago with a bunch of other students. After about a week of traveling from city to city on the bus together, one girl looked out the window as the bus exited the Autobahn, pointed at a sign and blurted out, “We’ve sure been visting a lot of towns named ‘Ausfahrt!’” It took a while for the giggles to die down so we could explain it to her.

[sub][sup]Note to the language-impaired: “Ausfahrt” is German for “exit”[/sub][/sup]

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An earlier post included a quote from TK where he declared himself Andy’s heir apparent. Gag.

Culturally, I think it is worth noting that not many American public schools teach art history or any sort of visual art other than arts-and-crafts. I, for example, learned some basic history of the other arts (music, theater, literature) and received some advice how to approach and interpret it; this was not true for any form of visual art.

While I believe that adults certainly have the choice to frequent museums and galleries or to take additional classes on art, I believe we do a great disservice to our country culturally by not educating young people about visual literacy and art history. In fact, I would go further and suggest that this lack of basic visual art education is what leads to the perception of art as an elitist or upper-class preoccupation.

Finally, I don’t think you can force feed anyone an appreciation for different types of art, but you do people a disservice by not preparing them to approach art.

(Sorry that this is rather generic and doesn’t address the topic of TK directly. I think his work is drek but am mostly in awe of his sense of self-importance and his ability to discredit other artists, such as Picasso and Warhol.)

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I meant that I don’t understand how you connect TK and Warhol stylistically.

BTW, I’m the one who posted the quote where TK connects himself to Warhol.

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The funny thing is - we have these classes in our schools. And art is perceived as upper class, elitist and generally boring.

I don’t have a sollution as to what could be done. But the lack of education can’t be the only answer.

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Art is all just crap. It’s a criminally underfunded endeavour in American society, and as a whole, a completely unnecessary to the cultural lexicon. We worship freely at the altar of the dollar, kneeling en masse to formless fluff and blameless verse. Mariah Carey should be horsedragged through MidTown Manhattan, instead she’s got a multimillion dollar condo high above it, while Lucinda Williams toils in relative nothingness by comparison.

Kincade is to painters what Carey is to music, yet the goal of both painters and musicians (using the term without a bit of connection to Carey) is to sell their wares. Tell me, any one of you, who wouldn’t trade a bit of “artistic integrity” for a shitload of financial security? Would you rather have the pot pie from Aldis, or fresh Lobster in the Caribbean? You can say pot pie all you want, but once you taste the lobster, all bets are off (I know, some don’t like/are allergic to seafood, save the nitpicks).

Sure TK is worse than shit, the pseudo-luminescent trees, the harmless pastels, the unnatural color schemes, the horridly fucking annoying cottages everywhere, not to mention the fact that he puts his wife’s initial in everything (like a Borders’ version of where’s waldo), but the cat is gettin’ his, in a big way.

The days of the artisan are long gone people, no more corner book stores, no more local movie houses, no more serious art galleries, it’s all history, all of it. Finished. I lament that often, and write about it when I can, but the end result is ALWAYS the same. I have to take art where I find it, and leave the Mariah Careys and the Thomas Kinkades of the world where they belong.

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By the way, Long Live Charles Bukowski, Tony Fitzpatrick, Jay Marvin, Hunter S. Thompson and Alan Ginsberg.

Fuck Jack Kerouac.

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Gaspode and Moi, do you think the problem might be in the content of art education? Gaspode has definitely convinced me that many intelligent people are alienated via the current approach; something else needs to be done.

Personally, I find most art history terribly dull myself - from most professors it’s not really about how artists create, it’s more about the theories of the person lecturing on the artists. I’ve been in classes where they make this big deal out of the fact that people in one area used one material whereas people in another area used another (trees in the northwest U.S.! adobe in the southwest U.S.!) and it’s like - DUH - people use what’s handy.

Or you take the guided tour in a museum and they’re full of boring anecdotes about the people in the paintings - I couldn’t care less about Sir whatever and Lady whosits! I want to know how the artist approached the challenge of capturing this person’s essence, I want to explore brush strokes, use of color, etc.

I wonder if it might be more useful to teach art appreciation and drawing/painting simultaneously, so that people can experience the tools of visual communication, try problem-solving, and examine various solutions. We had a terrific painting teacher who had us imitate different painting approaches, and he presented slides by accomplished painters at the beginning and end of each episode.

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I don’t think the connection is one of artistic style.

An argument can be made that both TK and Warhol have/had an interest in engaging popular culture, rather than the usual artworld crowd. (I’m thinking early Warhol here, when he was snubbed by the manly Abstract Expressionists.)

Or TK may have been exposed to some of Warhol’s personal philosophy (about people? life? aesthetics?) and align himself with that.

I think TK sees in Warhol a man who elevated the everday and created art with objects that people could recognize (again, in comparison to Pollock or even Rauschenberg); TK is declaring himself heir apparent to this populist mission.

IMHO. YMMV. Lotsa other letters. :cool:

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fessie, we’re starting to be so reasonable, that this might not be pit worthy anymore, but I’ll throw in €0.02.

It’ll take some explaining.
Sweden is a small country. We’re 9 million in an area about the size of California. The sothern part has a climate similar to Seattle (Ugh!) and the northern part is like Alaska (Ugh-Ugh!). For some reason, there has been many musical acts, that have made it (more or less) on the international music scene. A lttle too many to just be explained with talent.
First out was ABBA, which where enormous in most of the world, but not the US. During the 80’s, Roxette hit it big and showed the way. For many young musicians it was like a beacon - “Per Gessle [in Roxette, who writes all the music], grew up in Nowhereville, Sweden and has had 4 or five #1 songs on the Billboard chart. If he could do it, so can we.”
And so, there are a nuber of Swedish bands making it big. Much more so than from similar countries, e.g. Finland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium. Even the bigger countries - rance, Italy - has produced few pop artists who make it big in the US, which is the toughest market in the world to conquer. It’s a matter of some national pride for us, even if most Americans couldn’t care less and wouldn’t be able to point out Sweden on a world map.

Right now, The Hives is growing big, Soundtrack of Our Lives was recently on Letterman and was nomonated for a Grammy. Neneh Cherry is Swedish. So is Robyn (who’s trying to make a comeback, after her second album bombed), and Cardigans just released a new album.

So what’s all that got to do with art?

Free music schools.

In grade school and high school, we too have these incredibly boring art and music classes. I can almost fall asleep just by thinking about it, and it’s been more than 20 years. But for kids who show musical talent/aptitude there is free community schools in every town. So your kid wants to learn how to play a guitarr? Guess what? It’s not gonna cost you a thing (well, buying a used guitarr to start out, but no tuition). The schools are good at finding the talents and helping them get further in their training if they want to. When they get older, there are studios. Not professional, but enough so you can make a demo tape without paying a truckload of money.
One such talent is Robyn, who had hit’s in the US with, IIRC, “Do you really want me,” “Show me love” and “Do you know what it takes?”. She was 17 at the time and dropped out of school. She can’t be dismissed for being a Brittney wannabe, since she writes all songs herself. A musical wunderkind.

he same goes for all those incredibly good Swedish tennis players. You don’t need to be a member in a fancy club to get started or training. It’s only a nominal fee.

I’m not a friend of socialism. However, this has been really, really good for Sweden. And it’s payed off too. Music is a big exportindustry now. Not on par with iron ore, Ericsson cell phones or Losec ulcer medication. But still significant.

So, in short, I think that encouraging the natural curiosity kids have is a great thing. Making them develop that curiosity, without the parents having to pay an arm and a leg is also good. And I think it’s beneficial to the society too.

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Wow, that is really interesting. Fascinating.

Just for the record, my sister is was major ABBA fan back in the day. And I’ll throw in another tangent myself - I’m a member of a community orchestra (I play the violin, altho not well) and one of our missions is to keep (the many varieties of) classical music alive by sharing it with the next generation. So our concerts are cheap - and kids 12 and under get in for free. We’re looking for more ways to make connections with the community & get people in the door while still paying our bills.

More food for thought…Thanks so much for sharing!

Geez, you have a point about this venue…seems like in order to be pit-worthy there should be some name-calling going on…let’s see…

Your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberries. That should do it. :slight_smile: