Well, I had feeling mentioning Parrish and Rockwell was going to raise some hackles. Hey, I actually find both of them rather interesting, but I think it’s perfectly fair to lump them in with Kincade for the thematic sameness and the relentlessly market-driven nature of much of their work.
Hey, anyway, I think Warhol can be fairly placed in this group as well. Sure he was ironic about it, but in the end I believe his work was as much about mass marketing as it was anything else.
It doesn’t, for me at least. I don’t get upset about fads for things, like, say, the old Farrah Fawcett posters, and I consider Kinkade’s work to have about as much real content. I will say, however, that if I really wanted to get upset about Kinkade, it would be because seen the work of innumerable artists who create works of interest and deserve greater attention from the public.
Hey, I’m sympathetic with people who feel that much of contemporary art is too cerebral or abstracted from reality for them, but I believe that it is a mistake to assume, as you apparently do, that the purpose of art is provide you with pleasant, non-threatening, content-free possessions to hang on the wall.
There’s certainly plenty of crap to go around in contemporary art, and it is an unavoidable fact that the entire conceptual wing of art seems to have become almost irreparably divorced from the interest of much its potential audience. Nevertheless, I’d much rather see an exhibition of failed works by an artist who was trying something different, than anything by Kinkade and his ilk.
I’ll just mention here that I’ve currently got a couple of pleasant, competent, low-content paintings hanging in my living room, but I have them because they were created by my mother, and one of them in particular greatly influenced the themes of my own photography, athough I did not realize it initially. Kinkade, OTOH, does nothing that strikes any personal connection in me.
One final comment:
The furor over “Piss Christ”, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of gay sex acts and such things as Damien Hirst’s sectioned animals has never had a whole lot to do with any significant trends in art, and each of these artists, with the possible excpetion of Hirst, is considered fairly minor at this time. In each case, the fuss was mainly the creation of persons who were ready and willing to be outraged and was hyped incessantly by the media. I think there are actually very few serious and honest artists who consider outrage simply for outrage’s sake to be much more than a stylistic dead end.
Jeepers, God knows what you’d think if you ever saw Jeff Koons’ porn-inspired tableaux with Ciccolina.
Hunh, sorry to hijack this joyful bash-fest into a Great Debate.
