Thomas Kincaide is a terrible artist. In the technical sense, he’s not bad; easily as good as any 2nd year art student. Conceptually, his work is pure dreck; unoriginal, sentimental, fluffy, engineered post-card crap. “Painter of Light”?! Pleeeease.
Kincaide’s true genius is marketing. His marketing people have taken nondescript schlock art and made it as big as sliced bread. Thomas Kincaide is a corporation, not an artist. He’s the McDonalds of art; cheap, inferior, processed shit that is available everywhere and designed to appeal to the masses in a way that real art can’t (or won’t).
As a working artist, who almost certainly doesn’t have a print hanging in your Grandma’s kitchen or a calendar available at the Bible Store, I daydream of winning the lottery and purchasing an original Thomas Kincaide painting so I can wipe my ass with it.
You do have to understand, BTW, that Thomas Kinkade is a company. It literally talks about Kinkade as a brand name, like Kleenex or Sani-Flush. Kinkade is interested in commerce, not art.
In other words, Kincaide is hated because other artists who think (rightly or wrongly) that they’re much better than he is are insanely jealous of his immense success.
Sister Wendy forgive me, this makes two times I have ‘defended’ Kincaide on these boards, but, wouldn’t you admit that he did have a talent at painting that glow of light? Even if the effect was not what one would call high art?
I love Thomas Kincaide. No, not the paintings, I tend more towards Magritte or Ivan Albright myself. What I love is that his ruthless business practices and his bizarre and selfish personal life is exactly to my mind a living, breathing performance artistic rendering of Christian mega-churches. The guy is at once portraying a cheap and wholly unbelievable portrait of an imaginary land that never existed, while at the same time acting like Caligula on methamphetamines. Fucking brilliant.
One needs to walk into a Kincade franchise store and see the paintings side by side and all over to understand that “warm glow” does not good art make. One planted above the entry at an old lady’s house is quaint. More than one is a Scooby Doo marathon.
Oh, I agree. I wouldn’t say that Kincaid was Bierstadt’s equal, but they employ the same techniques to attract an audience. From the wiki entry on Albert B:
I hate TK because he has the apparent recent imagination of a 3rd grader. His paintings are repetitive, he overcharges for prints with someone else’s daubs on them, and he insults my idea of Christian honesty.
All of a sudden I’m remembering this episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent when a wealthy businessman and his wife are murdered in their home. After deciding that their druggie son was probably framed, Logan and Wheeler start looking at a seemingly kindly family friend. Wallace Cantor is an artist who was looking to sell franchises in his work. A couple who signed up to buy one were gushing about the wholesome small-town values his work depicted.
I’m starting to get an eerie sense of familiarity…
Well it’s quite obvious he knows nothing about his subjects. There are cars pitting on the first lap, the fly by is supposed to happen at the end of the national anthem, not during the green flag start, and there isn’t a single shirtless hairy back in the crowd.
