“I am Kinkade, painter of light”
“then why are you casting Magic Missile?”
Salvador Dali. He even called himself “a whore” once.
Unfortunately, yes it is - Pochacco asked that question specifically.
Yes, I’ve read every post.
You can also take the attitude I have described above, and say that anything that isn’t intended to offend everyone except the self-appointed elite is bad art.
You keep telling me that Kinkade has terrible technique, and produces bad art. Therefore it isn’t his technique that is the basis for his success - it’s all marketing or something.
OK, fine - I tend to be a proponent of the “if you so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” school of art criticism. You keep saying that Kinkade is a bad artist who is only successful because he has informercials or something. Therefore, all you need is to put the objectively better art into an informercial, and it will easily outsell Kinkade - because it has the advantage of being objectively superior as well as being well marketed.
Or else Kinkade has something about his technique that you are not willing to see or admit. And the secret of his overwhelming success is not what you claim.
Or, as I mentioned, art criticism is subjective, and all the ranting about how bad Kinkade is “I don’t like it”. Which is fine, but no better than the opinion of someone who does like it, and badly outnumbered.
Put it like this -
*"Look at he NASCAR painting again. You are mistaken about the perspective.
It is actually a subversive work of art. Kinkade is playing with our expectations of what art should be. By altering the perspective, he is jarring our sensibilities. Notice how the jets are flying overhead, but not everyone in the crowd is looking at them. This is a rejection of militarism in modern culture, in favor of a deeper sensibility of view.
Kinkade is saying that a new aesthetic of art has to arise, not out of the so-called elite, but from the proletariat. He simultaneously rejects the static forms of the past and the sterile, post-Soviet realism suggested in other works. His use of light shows that the proletarians, who he seems to be embracing, will be challenged in their view without even knowing. He is disturbing our vision of what popular art does even while reassuring us.
It is a deeply post-modern view, and has much to say about the role of art in popular culture."*
Now that explanation has just as much to support it as any other.
It’s like the Thurber cartoon about wine tasting -
That cartoon is funny because it is something you can say about anything.
Same for Kinkade. If you think or assume he is saying something congenial to your worldview, then you can decide that what would have offended is really saying something ironic. If not, you don’t. And you wind up like lissener arguing to the death that Showgirls is great art.
Regards,
Shodan
Nobody is saying that Kinkade isn’t a great marketer.
If it were true that this is what he were trying to do, the effort is so pathetic, the effect so cloying and maudlin, that I think if this were truly what he was attempting it would make me think even less of this art. If this were true, it makes his art worse, because its short-comings become ever more severe.
Anyone who knows art and art criticism can easily perceive that this is all bullshit. You think you’re being very clever, but, sad to say, you’re not. But again, I say, were any of this true it would damn Kinkade’s schlock all the more, because it makes it seem like even a more pathetic effort than it is already. The fact is, that he is clearly trying to embrace “the static forms of the past,” and does so with only marginal success. If someone were really trying to subvert something, they should really have better skill at doing it properly in the first place. What you see in Kinkade is sloppiness, not subversion.
No it doesn’t. For one thing, there is not the smallest shred of evidence Kinkade believes anything of the sort. For another, you’ll search in vain for any evidence in the actual paintings for any of the ideas you describe. They’re not there; he didn’t put them there; he didn’t try to put them there. Notice that none of the criticism of this thread criticizes him as a post-modern, because he obviously isn’t one. Your poorly executed fake art-criticism has no merit.
Then EDUCATE me! What is it that YOU see in his technique that explains his success?
His detractors are saying that his art is poorly executed and only sells because he’s a relentless huckster. You’re arguing that his art is actually well executed, but we just can’t see it. Help us understand what you’re seeing and maybe we’ll change our minds about him.
This would be a reasonable explanation if the collectors of his work were buying it for ironic reasons. Jeff Koons has a big following precisely because he uses kitsch as an intellectual joke on high art.
But neither Kinkade nor his fans are playing that particular post-modern game. They’re completely earnest.
Not really. It’s not an accurate description of the intent of either Kinkade or his audience.
We already covered this. If Kinkade only sells because he is a relentless huckster, and is a bad artist to boot, all that a good artist needs to do is become a somewhat less relentless huckster. He will then automatically outsell Kinkade because he is also a great artist as well as a huckster.
Nonsense - you are simply hidebound by outmoded ideas about representational art. Kinkade has gone beyond that. He embodies Soviet realism because he transcends it.
The purpose of it is to be cloying and maudlin - that drives the viewer away from his preconceptions and into a possibility of real recognition.
It’s all there - you just need to abandon your ideas of Art, which are no doubt the result of colonialism, and open up to the new experience Kinkade represents.
It’s all quite post-modern and ironic. Of course the bourgeouisie of the art establishment don’t like it - it violates their notions, which are based on a phallocentric good/bad high art/low art dichotomy that no longer exists.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m not sure I follow this. First of all, I think it’s a little more difficult to be a successfully relentless huckster than you’re indicating, here. Also, I’m not sure that all you need to do to unseat a successfully relentless huckster is to be a slightly higher-quality relentless huckster. Once somebody like that has market saturation, I think they’re pretty much golden.
Anyway, I’m sure some people genuinely like Kinkade, and that’s fine. But I do think that if you apply standards like use of perspective, color, etc., to his work, he doesn’t come off well compared to many other artists. I’m not sure why this is working you into a frenzy, Shodan. My 5-year-old’s fingerpainting looks pretty cool and is hanging on our wall, but I wouldn’t consider it great art.
Shodan, I’ll ask you again:
If Kinkade isn’t merely a huckster, what elements of his technique explain his success?
Of course, we all know the real answer. You don’t really have a defense of Kinkade. That’s why you’re hiding behind snark.
We get it. You don’t like modern art. You think it’s a scam and art critics are poseurs. They use weaselly language to make crap seem deep and to make good paintings seem crappy. And look, you can play the same game! You can make something obviously crappy seem deep, just by making the right noises. How socratic! Rather than just plainly stating your position, you’ve coaxed us along with a cunning little trail of breadcrumbs!
Sigh. You’re actually asking some interesting questions. But if you really want to argue this, it would help if you’d stop with the gamesmanship.
Here are a few more questions for you:
Do YOU believe there is an objective standard for good and bad art?
Are some paintings better than others?
If being a huckster is so easy, why are there so many people in prison?
Being a good artist takes a certain set of skills. Being a good huckster takes a different set of skills. Kinkade doesn’t need to be a good artist for the same reason that L. Ron Hubbard didn’t need training in the field of mental health. Kinkade is undeniably a skilled artist, but only in the medium of bullshit.
You obviously don’t think that the ‘art elite’ are any better than Kinkade, which is actually an argument that I have a certain degree of sympathy with. But traditional representational artists dislike him too, and it’s not because they’re jealous of his masterful technique.
Seriously, do you really believe that Kinkade, purely as a painter, produces better work than thousands of anonymous greeting-card artists over the years who simply didn’t happen to be totally shameless?
Or, if I might add on, might have been fine with being totally shameless, but didn’t have the skills or opportunity to be able to market themselves in the way that Kinkade has been able to.
Well, yeah; I’ve seen a few people at art shows trying to pull the “pigment-enhanced giclee print” bit. It doesn’t work as well at street level.
If anyone relly need a reason to hate this man, check out his facebook page.
He writes just like he paints.
Hi Mr. ZenBeam, I’m not “trying to play gotcha,” but does your aversion to seeing the paint also keep you from enjoying Impressionism?
Does it keep you from enjoying Rembrandt?
Does it keep you from enjoying cartoonists like Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes" or Jack Davis that often feature prominent brush strokes rather than smooth tonal gradations?
I can appreciate a smooth surface, (Dali, Norman Rockwell) but really love a swift, evocative brush stroke like you’d see in much of Rembrandt or Fredrick Remington.
I have this unsettling vision of Shodan contemplating wall upon wall of framed and numbered Kinkade prints, suddenly beginning to worry about whether this was really the best way to invest the retirement money.
ICk. “Thom” has got to be one of the most pretentious spellings of a nickname out there.
I don’t really like some Impressionism, no. For example its namesake Impression, soleil levant. I don’t like the brush strokes in the foreground of the water, pretending to be waves. I don’t like techniques where the artist applies a brush stroke in a certain way, and it kind of looks like branches on a tree or something.
The last two pictures in The Gallery from the Impresionism page are nice, however, so apparently Impressionism covers a wide range.
It’s not strictly “seeing the paint” as I had said earlier, it’s more seeing the insincerity in the paint. I’m not really sure how to explain it. (I think of Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin to rise out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere.) I can appreciate Pointillism. When you are close and see the points, they are what they are. They aren’t pretending to be something else. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for example, is nice. All the detail in the tree on the left, for example, was added by the artist, and closer in you can see the paint, but it isn’t trying to be something else.
This is rather gratuitous, Shodan. Maybe you could confine your criticisms to people you’re actually interacting with?
True - my apologies.
OTOH, I suspect the Doper mentioned will never see my posts, for reasons that cannot be discussed outside the Pit.
Regards,
Shodan
His stuff reminds me somewhat of a print a friend and I picked up at Wal-mart for our first apartment–a little country cottage with roses out front and a little lamplight in the window. It was $15, framed, and it matched our curtains. (Well, the bedsheet I had made into a valance, but you see what I’m getting at.) It was a pleasant, inoffensive little picture that looked a little more polished than thumbtacking up Brad Pitt posters and kept our living room from looking too awfully naked. That was it.
And that’s all I’ve ever seen in any Kinkade picture I’ve ever seen. There’s no heart or fabulous technique to them that differentiates them from thousands of other pictures of the same type. The only difference is that for some reason every one of his quaint, rustic cottages (presumably inhabited by quaint, rustic, simple people) is lit up like a fucking riverboat casino. I got new for you, bucko, people who use lamps or candles rather than electric lights typically aren’t that wasteful with 'em. There wouldn’t be tons of lights lit in every single room of the place. At least the $15 print we had only showed lights in one window.