Oh dear…I didn’t know the name, but unfortunately I think I have seen some of his paintings…Are you trying to tell me that people actually spend a lot of money on this excrement?? So there is some kind of sick Thomas Kinkade trend sweeping the country?? People like this??? Ack, ignorance was indeed bliss…Now I’m depressed.
You know, I’m not a huge fan of Warhol’s work, but he was still a pretty neat and talented individual.
To say you’re his heir apparent…that’s just complete hubris. That takes balls.
And from someone like Kinkade, it shows delusions of grandeur.
Blech.
I suppose I should, El_Kabong. I got carried away, I’ll admit, but still…
Holy guacamole, that is the funniest thing I have ever read…pure gold!
Phouchg
Lovable Rogue
[sup]EMPHASIS ADDED[/sup]
Excellent dissection of this poseur.
And while this rotter “laughs all the way to the bank,” we are supposed to admire him or sit idly by while he fleeces poor morons? A true and proper love of art is quite the opposite of “pompous.” An interest in elevating human experience through artistic expression and its appreciation is one of the highest goals humans can attain. Fuckwits like Kincaide blur and distort the role of art in ways that cast a shadow over many other true artistic endeavors. His self-promotion rivals only that of Madonna. I regard them both in a similar light and most certainly not as artists.
If there is any justice, Kincaide will spend his eternity submitting routinely rejected comic book drawings. The bastard is single-handedly tainting the good name of all artists.
Didn’t KISS do that with a comic book?
He did not say that. Please tell me he did not fucking say that. What a power tool.
If Warhol were alive, he’d beat Kinkade to death with a Campbell’s Soup can. (Actually, Jin, I think there’s potential for some more anti-Kinkade art here…)
Dr. J
Hey, in a way, a useful moron like this is good.
I mean while some folks will drop 80K on a piece of his feces spread on a canvas, there is an actual piece of good art that isn’t getting bought. Thus, the fewer people that have good taste, there will be more good art per person with good taste. Imagine! Cheap Picassos! Rembrant? only 800$! I think I like it. I wish he were more popular, except the fact that I would have to see his garbage everywhere.
Look, the mass-production aside, his paintings suck ass anyway. I wouldn’t pay 800 dollars for an original kinkade, much less a poster painted by a day-laborer.
I would urge anyone to read what Ray Carney has to say about movies, because, to me, Thomas Kinkade is the same as Brittney Spears, or Joel Schumacher. Look, its something that may be appealing on the most base level, but there is no complexity. Good art will not send a clear message very often. But not only does he have the same message, its the same every FUCKING time! “Oooh, look at this cute little fucking house next to a goddamn horse and a fucking yellow sky! I wish I were there. How sweet. This must be heaven!” A true artist can bring beauty to somethign that you think is ugly.
He includes his hair and BLOOD?
EEEEEWWWWW!!!
Where’s the barfing smiley when we need it?
You’re right, Capybara. It’s from Ruskin’s Notes to the Royal Academy show of 1855. It looks like he attacked a whole slew of artists in that review, but in that quote he seems to have been referring to Daniel Maclise and his painting The Wrestling Scene from “As You Like It”.
Even though it’s not one of Maclise’s better paintings, it’s still better than anything that Kinkade ever did. 
Well, it’s totally clear to me now. Someone is going to have to take one for the team and kill him. I’d volunteer, but I have a nail appointment coming up.
But he also painted happy little clouds! How could you have forgotten the happy little clouds?
Someone already posted a link to Amy Brown, but I’ll add a couple of my favorite painters as well to combat the nausea induced by discussion of the Painter of Unnatural Light:
i particularly like how his idea to sell posters for 800 dollars was an inspiration from God–his art agent to be precise. Stunning.
Oh my…I can certainly see why people hate Kincaid…
Painters and Critics and Buyers, Oh my.
It took three full pages for something resembling enlightment to enter this thread, which was when Jinwicked stepped in.
I had never heard about TK until I opened this thread. Curiosity made me check out the links to his ‘art’, and it is indeed spectaculary bad.
However, Having worked in radio all my adult life, has taught me some humilty. Beleive it or not, there are actually people out there who not only like Britney Spears - they think she’s the best musician/artist ever born. The same goes for Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey. I could make a list with actors, writers, painters, what have you, who are considered crap by those with ‘insight’ but are loved by a great many paople.
It’s art/culture if it’s liked by the viewer/reader/listener/consumer. A postcard with a cute kitten, or a sunset over a tropical Island, is art for my dad. He likes looking at it. He enjoys the feeling he gets, whereas he thoroughly despises one of my favourites, by Goya.
Even if it’s the Pit, we’re supposed to be fighting ignorance here. And it wasn’t untill Jinwicked stepped in that we actually started doing so. Three full pages of condenscending vitriol, which surely won’t make the buyers of TK’s crappy art try to look at something else and maybe expand their horizons.
So supposedly, and it’s the impression I get from reading a thread like this, we, the Dopers, are so smart and educated, that in our snobbish effort to stamp out ignorance, it’s OK to trample the ignorant masses for their preferences in culture.
Bite me, Gaspode. I agree that Jinwicked added a fine post, personally it’s one of my favorites. But several other people added good writing as well. And notice that waaayyy back on page 2, in my conversation with CanvasShoes, I enumerated the visual flaws with Kinkade’s work.
I so wish I could add a .jpg here, because I’d love to diagram how bad his work is. Tell you what, I’ll go to that buttmunch’s web page - here, let’s look at “Season Hideaway”, on the front page of www.thomaskinkade.com. I’ll try to stick to objective terms.
Start on the upper left, with the sky. I won’t rip on the sky on this one, it’s similar to a lot of good paintings and reminds me of something Parrish would do, soft pastels. I’ve seen sunsets like that. But now notice that it doesn’t really go with the rest of the painting - for some reason, he changes palettes dramatically, going from gentle pastels to garish high-contrast reds and purples. That’s a sign of amateurism - ones approach ought to encompass the whole piece, not switch abruptly and without reason. The point of a realistic painting is to represent a moment in time, so you wouldn’t see two disparate views simultaneously; if you’re doing something else, you’d best be really skilled to pull it off. In his work it’s just illogical.
Okay, about those reds and purples - have you ever looked at a real bush (vegetative, I mean). Foliage doesn’t go from bright to dark like that - or if it did, if that’s the approach he wanted to take, then why is the sky so gently painted? It’s incongruous, you wouldn’t see both things together. The leaves are badly painted, just slap slap slap with a fan brush - no treatment, no looking. Light bounces through shrubs, they’re not just bright at the top and black underneath.
Next let’s look at those rocks. Every one of them is exactly the same. In real life, two similar rocks spaced a foot apart would be treating that sunset differently - you’d see reflected light from the sky on the ones further from the viewer, and their contrast would be higher. The ones closer to the viewer would have a wider range of lights and shadows.
That’s how you describe space using color - you don’t just rely on perspective alone. At least, not in a painting where the sky is treated with such gentle care - if the point was just high contrasts, then the sky would need to be painted that way as well.
Looking at that building closeup, the stones appear to be wallpaper. They have no depth or texture that one would associate with stone, just a medium shade with a darker one underneath it, over and over. Read “Zen and the Art of Motorocycle Maintenance” if you don’t already know how different one brick looks from another. Now that’s not to say that every painting of a house has to have the bricks detailed in such a way - sometimes they’re even more vague in really good paintings. My problem with this one is that it’s half-assed; if you’re going to paint something realistically, indicating each stone separately, then for God’s sake look at the thing. The walls deserve at least as much care as the sky.
Now look at the roof - if I zoom in, I can see the area in the center, just above the window, very clearly. He’s painted the roof using about 4 shades of blue and thrown on a yellow highlight to represent a relationship with the light from the sunset. Again, a half-assed treatment. A roof’s colors don’t actually look like that - there would be relationships to the light from the window, to the vegetation, to the other areas of the building. And the light from the sunset would affect the roof in varied and interesting ways. Not a generic blue tone.
Kinkade’s approach is capricious and sloppy, and his palette is nasty.
Blech.
I’m going to go look at some Edward Hopper now, and I recommend anyone who got through this post might want to do the same. I’m sure I’ll be feeling much better shortly.
One more point.
In art, in representational or realistic art, the way you get there is to paint what you see, not what you know. I draw quick-sketch portraits at craft shows and art fairs, and people are always asking me how I do it - it’s no mystery. I draw what I see, not what I know. I’m no big deal, I’ll never be rich or famous, I barely make expenses - but because I honor that principle, often I make moms cry when I draw their kids.
The problem w/Kinkade is he’s painting what people know a painting should look like - walls, roofs, trees, bushes, sky, water. Each of those elements is recognizable as such. But they don’t come together to create a painting, there’s no relationship between them. And that’s what makes a painting art (good art, that’s another issue).
If I were to draw your portrait as just eyeballs, nose, mouth, hair and jaw, without drawing the relationship between them, you would see it as a farce. Things would not be in the right place and you’d instantly say “that’s wrong”. But somehow, because he’s sticking to painting landscapes and because he’s a good talker, Kinkade’s been able to pull off this tomfoolery and call it art. It’s an insult to every person who loves art, every student of art, every aspiring artist, and every accomplished artist.
fessie. You don’t like his art, the way he paints. Fine. Obviously, some people do.
Jinwicked brought up dubious business morals, and for me, that’s really the only valid critique I think is worth talking about. Everything else is just a metter of taste.
I find Hopper boring. And don’t tell me the estate hasn’t made a whole lot of money from posters and such. Not to mention what kind of moneys Picasso’s estate has made.
For something to be art, for me, it has to envoke some kind of emotion. Now TK only envokes naussea for me and I don’t want to be sick in my own home. But the contant bashing of him here might as well be directed to those who actually keep him in business, by saying they are idiots for buying the stuff.
I don’t think they are. They have other preferences for art, than I have.
We have these types of threads over in Cafe Society quite often (It’s where I post the most). Someone will say “Isn’t that J.Lo the biggest bitch?” Well, boh-fucking -hoh. Why care? Why bother? Nobody forces anyone to buy her albums, see her movies. The same with Kinkade.
I was the same way back when, in high school and college. I found a new group and played the album for all my friends, wanting them to find, to hear, what nugget of musical gold I’d found. When the band then went on and made it big, I called them sell outs and commercial hacks. No matter how you swing it, the whole attitude is condescending and elitistic and indirectly insults those who pay money for the so called art by Kinkade.
You don’t have to convince me about his works. I don’t like it. Then again, I don’t like other things, considered fine arts by many. I drink claret with my fish, I prefer Stepehen King over John Steinbeck and I will more often rent a movie starring Jennifer Anniston, than one starring Meryl Streep.
The thing is - by starting this thread, you only want to vent that you feel superior to people who buy art, which you think is crap.
So - You bite me.
One more time, Gaspode.
I wonder if our lack of communication on this is due to geography - here in the U.S., you can find Kinkade’s work in most major malls, in the Sunday supplement to your newspaper, on collector plates, in “The Museum Store” chains, etc. It’s everywhere. It goes beyond taste and into a part of our cultural identity; Kinkade-esque art has been around forever, but it was always marginalized. Sold out of the backs of trucks, at discount stores, and in hotels on the weekends. Now he’s brought it center stage and claimed that it’s good. On national television. By stating that he’s better than Picasso.
The point of this thread was not to express superiority over other people for their poor taste. My very first line was that this art is found in the homes of nice people (well, reasonably nice).
The problem is that this man is perpetuating a fraud by offering a poor product and claiming that it is a good one. Doggone it, there are standards in art and it’s time for artists to stand up and say so. I believe that my previous posts clearly outlined the problem with his paintings - they’re badly done.
I don’t blame people for their ignorance - I clearly blamed art educators for not teaching people about the grammar of visual art, and I blamed art critics for abandoning likable art in favor of trendy and controversial work that no one wants in their home.
Doing something badly and convincing people it’s good is as evil as every other kind of fraud. It’s not a victimless crime. Don’t tell me “it’s only art”. Not in an age when art funding is threatened, when kids are told not to pursue a career in art because it doesn’t pay, when a lot of good, likeable art being done is by artists working for advertising agencies who’ve allowed their gift to be prostituted into selling some commodity or another.
This is not about being elitist - in fact, it’s just the opposite. The art establishment doesn’t bother addressing this issue because part of their appeal is that “art isn’t for everyone”. They love watching the masses consume bile. My point is that art is for everyone and people deserve to be educated about art, about visual grammar. Would you deny people the right to learn to read, suggesting they be content with picture books because “it’s their taste”?
This from your OP:
and this from your last post:
is, to me at least, the sum of what you’re saying in all your posts.
Let me paraphrase it:
I don’t like people buying the crappy art of Thomas Kinkade. His shit is not even art, it’s massproduced dreck. People buy it, because they’re ignorant. They’re ignorant because they lack education in this field.
You can write a whole book, taking his pictures apart, proving what a hack he is, prove that his business is (almost) fraudulent* or what else you want to do. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re annoyed that people buy this, and you think they do it in a state of ignoramus.
Yes, Kinkade is, to the best of my knowledge, unknown here. We have our own hacks, selling stuff that I find to be terrible. Then again, I like bauhaus type houses, I don’t like curtains, I don’t want to have plants in my house. Who am I to come home to someone and say they are ignorant for not studying architecture and appreciating good interior design? If someone wants to watch Jerry Springer and not the latest almodovar, it’s their loss, in my opinion, but it’s not my problem and I don’t propose beefing up film studies in High School.
You can lead a horse to water, ASF.
You cannot force people to appreciate (what you consider) better art. In a way, that’s almost even worse than schools banning Harry Potter, because it’s devil worship, or as it was in my country in the 70’s, where TV banned Disney, because it was ‘American Cultural Imperialism’.
I’m sorry, but whenever someone says something like: “People really should start doing so and so, the way I do it, because it would be so much better for them”, it rubs me the wrong way. Especially being a writer/journalist/radio exec. Culture should only, only, survive on its own merits. No funding, no taxes, no subsidies (sp?). If what you make don’t appeal so enough people will buy it, thereby letting you make a living out of it, then sorry - it’s just not culture, it’s mental masturbation.
Your comparison about teaching people to read - well… I know some schools also make kids read ‘good’ literature. The problem is who’s supposed to be the judge of what’s good or not. I don’t think the schools should do so. And I don’t think that art classes, to educate the ignorant masses, should be mandatory either.
Obviously, YMMV.
Sorry, but you’re not allowed to use the word “merit”. You’ve argued repeatedly that there’s no way of judging what’s good, that it’s all a matter of taste. So in your world there is no such thing as merit.
Even if I grant you undeserved use of the term merit, the rest of your argument fails. No education? How is something supposed to survive on its own merits if no one knows anything about what merit is? That just doesn’t make any sense. How are people supposed to evaluate their preferences without knowledge? Whatever their parents had? Whatever’s most popular? That’s where Kinkade is truly scary - he’s setting the standard, not because of his accomplishments, but because he excels at getting his word out.
Arguing against education…well…that’s kind of a scary position for someone who says s/he’s a “writer/journalist/radio exec.” I guess you have more faith in the tabu la rasa than I; my preference is to learn.
You’ll note, too, that I directed people to any century of an art museum - I’m not about to dictate that one room eclipses all others, or that people should follow my preferences.
How enlightening. I take that to mean I’ve got you on the ropes & you’re too small to admit it.
I will acknowledge, though, this has been a hoot-'n-a-holler, and has given me a great opportunity to define my views more clearly. I think in the back of my mind I was actually hoping someone would write in to argue w/me, so that I could see what the argument held. So far, not much.
And, just FTR, Stephen King is a very well-read man. Check out the intro to Night Shift for some of the names he drops.