Sorry you don’t like it.
Great artists are always misunderstood.
Regards,
Shodan
Because the measure of any creative endeavour is does it do what it claims on the box? In other words, irrespective of any categorisations of “high” or “low” art, how well does it achieve what it intends? Nobody was going to give the movie Iron Man an Oscar, excellent as it was, {and it was better than the overblown, overbusy and overpraised Dark Knight, in my opinion} because it wasn’t that kind of film: what it set out to do was give you two hours of fun, excitement, explosions and big evil robots beating the shit out of good little robots, and on those terms it succeeded admirably.
So what was Kinkade’s intention in his Nascar painting? Similar to the makers of Iron Man, I would imagine: he wanted to capture the noise, the spectacle, the excitement, the raw energy of a car race. Well, good luck to him: he’s not going to be the critics’ darling doing that, but nobody’s to say it isn’t a valid reason to paint. The problem is, he fails miserably at what he sets out to do: for all the reasons listed above - and for me the technical shortcomings, such as the cars apparently lurching in and out of different scales - are the least of them.
It’s a bad painting because it tries to evoke a sense of speed, drama and excitement, and succeeds only in being dull, static and lifeless: and the more excitement he tries to cram in, to the point of it going beyond failure into risibility {cars! jets! fireworks! uh, a blimp! note to self: monster trucks? have assistant check…}, the duller it becomes.
Well, that’s because they don’t produce infomercials explaining their work.
So, what qualities of Kinkade’s work do you like? What makes him so popular?
You’ve said that you think critics don’t like him for ideological reasons. I disagree. You’ll notice that in this thread alone he’s been compared unfavorably to both Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. Rockwell and Disney are neither high-brow nor avant-garde, and they both have powerful bourgeous appeal – but they’re also very good artists.
You’re attacking a strawman.
I was talking about my own posts, since that does not seem to be clear.
But you are missing the point. Art criticism has no objective basis. Therefore you can always praise something or other about an artist if you want to, and attack him as a shlock if you don’t. If Kinkade painted people with bullwhips up their asses or stuff like that, he wouldn’t sell but art critics of a certain sort would hear what they like to be told, and could say how imaginative or ironic or whatever it was.
Kinkade isn’t playing that game, and his success shows that it doesn’t need to be played to be a successful artist.
But the question "why does he sell’ is up to you to answer, not me. Y’all are running on about how dreadful he is. Yet he outsells all the other artists on the SDMB put together.
Yet we are expected to believe that your opinion should be definitive, and all the millions of others who disagree are wrong.
Uh huh.
It’s like the joke of the mother seeing her son march in a band. “Oh look”, she says - “thirty two people on the field, and my son is the only one in step.”
Regards,
Shodan
Wow? Really! I did not know that!
Have you paid any attention to what’s actually been said in this thread?
Sure. If you treat every engagement with art as a one-off and don’t try to build a consistent aesthetic frame that has play value across a wide variety of works.
You act as though the only alternatives are Kinkade or Mapplethorpe. I’m comparing him to Norman Rockwell. What’s your opinion of Rockwell? I think he’s a great artist and I’m prepared to defend my position without playing the “art critics are elitist meanies” game.
We’ve said why we think he’s bad. If you think we’re full of shit, tell us why! But “huh, guess he must be good cuz he sells” isn’t much of an answer!
Say I’m a young artist and I want to achieve Kinkade’s success. What elements of his technique do you recommend I emulate?
Technically I think I’d classify Disney as a pioneering entertainer, who hired very good artists.
Actually I think there’s an interesting comparison to be made. After all, Disney built his own media empire, just as Kinkade has built an industry from his art prints. So why is Disney’s studio output generally not regarded with the dismissive contempt that Kinkade’s is?
Part of it, I think, is that Disney and his artist were actually interested in breaking new artistic ground. His studio’s work went on to become a feature of the greater American culture, because he was daring enough to try things nobody else would. Why not a feature-length animated picture? Why not collaborate with Salvador Dali? Why not a robot Abraham Lincoln? And what about this new televison medium, what can we do with that? How about a utopian community of the future? He was a masterful salesman, but also a masterful showman, and he wasn’t ashamed to hire people more skilled than him to fulfill that vision. If he had merely been satisfied with meeting the preconceptions of his audience, he would have spent his entire career producing six-minute animated shorts.
Whereas I think it’s safe to say that Kinkade will never be embraced in the way that Disney has been, because he has no real vision of his own. He has nothing to say, only a tenuous gimmick. His output is entirely directed by his audience. Today NASCAR is popular, so he paints NASCAR. Disney is popular, so he paints Disney. Whatever is popular tomorrow, he’ll paint that. He is simply responding to the culture, not engaging it as an artist should. He may indeed possess the skills of an artist, but he deliberately lays them aside to reach more customers.
Like the Franklin Mint, Kinkade simply manufactures collectibles, not all of which will increase in value. His collectibles simply have a frame attached so that they can be hung on the wall. His work is uninspired and vacuous by design, so it should be no surprise that the result is forgettable art.
Maybe I’m just tired, but I’m trying to watch these You Tube clips with a seasoned critic’s eye and the result is laughter so hard tears are streaming down my face. What a beautiful metaphor.
ETA: Painter of Light? Really? I can think of nobody as deserving of that title as Monet. What a pompous ass.
Take a closer look. It’s not that easy, because the images are not real great online. Really let the second image wash over you.
Yeah, it’s mroe detailed. But it’s also colder, distant, and not in a good way. It doesn’t connect, and it makes the city look like a toy.
The first is warm, inviting. It makes me almost feel like I’m in the scene, and the city is a mysterious yet inviting world beyond the immediate.
Evren had the artist been going for a cold, miserable cityscape of hostility, the second is still bad for it. It makes me think the things, but not feel them like I was there. It’s simply a bad painting. It’s technically decent, but shows an utter lack of character.
Fortunately, the question “why does he sell” is not what we are arguing. The thread is “Why does everyone hat Thomas Kinkade.” And the participants in this thread are doing a fine job answering that.
Do you actually believe that?
I didn’t have much of an opinion on Thomas Kinkade, but every time someone posts a link to a page where a Kinkade painting is compared side-by-side with another, similar painting by a different artist, I usually like the one by the other artist. I think the reason Kinkade sells so much stuff isn’t because most people would always prefer the Kinkade painting to the painting by another artist, but that the other artist didn’t have the marketing savvy to get mall stores selling his stuff all over the country.
I believe it.
There’s nothing wrong with constructing an arbitrary aesthetic and then using it to judge the merit of works. What alternative do we have, really? If we want to engage with art we have to have some sort of framework to orient ourselves.
It’s like the rules for baseball. There’s no *objective *reason why three strikes should be an out. The rules are arbitrary, but they demarcate a configuration space that defines baseball as a process.
By creating rules for art we create the discursive space that allows art to exist. These rules may be an articulated critical theory, or they may merely be our own naive intuition, but they provide the structure that makes the aesthetic experience possible.
The fact that there is no objective basis for the rules of baseball does not mean that all baseball players are equally skilled … .
'Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Lite.
I don’t mean to align myself exactly with Shodan’s position, but I would agree that art criticism has no objective basis. Of course, society can agree on things like how much effort is put into it, what values are represented by it, originality, etc., and the art community as a whole can use this consensus to determine what makes something wonderful versus trite and crappy in the majority of their opinions, but people can also disagree with those things as irrelevant to what actually makes the art good. No matter how many critics you have behind you, you still can’t prove that Beethoven is objectively better than Toy-Box, any more than missionaries can prove that Christianity is better than atheism.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
The reason I don’t like the first painting is that I see the paint, and that takes me takes me out of it. I could never feel like I was “in the scene.”
What wrong with him?
Have any of you ever listended to the Partridge family?!
Ohh…wait…:smack:
Is it possible for an artist to be great and commercially successful at the same time?
Yeah, I’ve always thought that I might enjoy him if he illustrated children’s books. For some reason I feel like in that setting I would find his pictures enchanting and magical, instead of ridiculous and embarassing the way they are when framed on a grown-up’s wall.
Is it possible for a nation-wide restaurant chain to consistently provide high cuisine?