Peter Lik Set World Record in 2014

[faberryman]

Well, I'm just waiting for a new set of truck tires getting installed, plus a front end alignment, or I would have been done with this conversation a long time ago. But my general comments were sincere. I've seen it all. And I even actually have a small set of pigments comparable to what Michelangelo used in volume. No thalo blue, but ground highest grade pure lapis lazuli; no thalo green either - ground malachite. Red - either ground precious coral or toxic cinnabar. But the advantage they had back then is that assistants worked cheap, and there was no workman's comp fees or OSHA either. If someone complains about working conditions, just call em a heretic, and have them hauled away.

As far as architects go, it's almost immediately apparent which ones had actually themselves apprenticed in the trades they aspire to employ, and have actual hand-on experience, and those who only have a diploma and business license,
and not necessarily even common sense. One kind of architect you hire; the other kind, you don't. Likewise with engineers. Those who prove incompetent still have plenty of opportunities as city building inspectors and court expert witnesses.

You lost me.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Bad tastes knows no bounds. And what Kincade did was at best deplorable. I strongly rejected it the first time I saw it and even more so after learning the details of his con job. All things considered, the best thing Kincade ever did was offing himself because he was not adult enough to pay for the consequences of his actions.

 

[Patrick Robert James]

LIk is loose with the truth for sure. Years ago he was adamant about not using Photoshop but released an image with the moon in front of some clouds. Wrap your head around that. Lol.

I saw his tv show too. I think it was on the weather channel. Full of total b.s. You could have made a good drinking game out of that one. He went to the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley and the buildup was that he had to traipse across a burning desert and put his life on the line to get there. Well, the shadows were long so it was obviously winter, and the Eureka Dunes have a parking area right next to them, as anyone who has been there will tell you. No traipsing needed. Lol.

He strikes me as someone who will say or do whatever to make money. His audience is uneducated in art. Put those two together and you have a recipe to make money. I guess he makes it. Borderline fraud I'd say. I agree with Drew on that.

I won't knock the images he makes. Who cares? If someone likes them and if they want to buy them they just need to understand that they aren't really investment pieces. Not my thing though.

 

[Pieter12]

kitsch (noun):
1. art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.

 

[cullah]

Is this the joke thread?

still better than thomas struth!

 

[miha]

still better than thomas struth!

Absolutely not!

 

[Pieter12]

still better than thomas struth!

Did you fall down and hit your head recently?

 

[Rrrgcy]

kitsch (noun):
1. art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.

And nearly backward

schtik (noun):
1. a gimmick, comic routine, style of performance, etc. associated with a particular person. (By this I mean the photographer not either of anyone commenting)

 

[Vaughn]

Alan may not know a lot about art, but he knows what he likes.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Maybe it was being painted for kangaroos. That would explain a lot in this discussion too.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Alan may not know a lot about art, but he knows what he likes.

Here's me giving a dissertation on the brush strokes of Manet at the Getty Museum in LA. I also like his work.

 

[koraks]

Here's me giving a dissertation on the brush strokes of Manet at the Getty Museum in LA. I also like his work.

Yes. You told us: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/museum-photo-policies.201087/page-3#post-2712837

I like that photo BTW. Perhaps add it to your signature?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

For so many people here who claim in other threads they accept other photographers' creative styles and art because we're all different and shouldn't judge others' work, there seems to be a lot of negative comments against Lik's and Kincaid's art under the theory that they're bad people and their work is kitschy and flawed. Meanwhile, they're two very successful artists who made millions selling their work, What gives? What's really going on here? Van Gogh cut his ear off and never sold anything worth much while he was alive. Gauguin slept with the underage girls of Tahiti he painted naked. Who knows what Maplethorpe did? Judging Lik's and Kincaid's work based on their sins and picadilloes is foolish and beneath us. Most artists are nuts. Get over it.

OK you think Kincaid's work is kitschy. Common. Sure, he commercialized his work, made millions, and made millions of his customers happy. Lik liekwise may have put the moon in front of the cloud using Photoshop, but made lots of richer people happy. How many people bought your work?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Yes. You told us: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/museum-photo-policies.201087/page-3#post-2712837

I like that photo BTW. Perhaps add it to your signature?

Maybe I should make it my avatar.

 

[koraks]

Maybe I should make it my avatar.

That'd be awesome! Seriously, I think it's a great idea.

 

[Pieter12]

For so many people here who claim in other threads they accept other photographers' creative styles and art because we're all different and shouldn't judge others' work, there seems to be a lot of negative comments against Lik's and Kincaid's art under the theory that they're bad people and their work is kitschy and flawed. Meanwhile, they're two very successful artists who made millions selling their work, What gives? What's really going on here? Van Gogh cut his ear off and never sold anything worth much while he was alive. Gauguin slept with the underage girls of Tahiti he painted naked. Who knows what Maplethorpe did? Judging Lik's and Kincaid's work based on their sins and picadilloes is foolish and beneath us. Most artists are nuts. Get over it.

OK you think Kincaid's work is kitschy. Common. Sure, he commercialized his work, made millions, and made millions of his customers happy. Lik liekwise may have put the moon in front of the cloud using Photoshop, but made lots of richer people happy. How many people bought your work?

The fact that both salespeople (I won’t call them artists) use underhanded, PT Barnum style techniques to force their work on naive buyers does not bear comparison to what Van Gogh, Gauguin or Picasso may have done during their lifetimes. Kinkade and Lik’s success is purely monetary, certainly not artistic.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, there has been some misunderstanding about the philosophical connotations of having ones work done by others under guidance, versus the legal connotations. Even Ansel Adams farmed out his big mural printing work to a big commercial lab in SF better equipped for that than his own little darkroom was. And numerous artists like Damien Hirst (like him or not) have resorted to specialized craftsmen when upscaling the size of projects. That kind of lack of personal "hands-on" thing can be debated, but there's nothing inherently illegal about it.

What is illegal is deliberate misrepresentation. For example, there was a gallery in Carmel dedicated to the oil painting seascapes of a famous French painter of such and such a name (which I don't remember). People were being encouraged to buy his seascapes because these had great value in that particular genre. But that person didn't even exist! It was all being done by an assembly line in Mexico without any kind of significant artist oversight - basically a complete misrepresentation and scam. So the FBI eventually jumped on that pretty hard. Those paintings weren't cheap (even though they didn't look very impressive to me), and buyers were infuriated once they discovered they had been suckered.

Likewise, there was nothing inherently wrong in how Kincade invented a means to mass-produce basically posters at an exceptionally high level of quality. That included his fancy paint by numbers templates which allowed other workmen to fill in the colors in order to match clients own decor schemes. But when he tried to skirt the law by just adding a spot of two of his own paint, with his own hand, onto those, and then claiming that made each of them "original" paintings of high collector value (as deliberately implied by his sales agents), that was tempting the law to take a closer look at what was really involved, because many people were being deceived into paying unrealistically high prices for what they thought was a limited collector commodity, but which turned out to be mass-produced.

And that sudden awakening turned into a domino effect, and undercut his momentum right when he was financially overextended trying to expand his business empire into Kincade-theme real estate development too. So as the whole ball of yarn was collapsing, he resorted to conning and stiffing his own franchisees, cheating them, and that's when the FBI finally swung down the hammer.

I suspect it's just a matter of time, when it comes to Peter Lik too. Sooner or later, people like that get emboldened enough to think they can get away with anything. In the Vegas area, the FBI has much bigger fish to fry than him. But if a lot of consumer complaints start coming in from disillusioned buyers, something might happen. But in his case, lots of those rich types simply don't care. If tired of their $40,000 sofa, they just throw it out and buy another one. Same with a big piece of framed decor on the wall. They aren't really art collectors at all, but mostly conspicuous consumption types with giant indoor walls needing to be covered with something.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

That'd be awesome! Seriously, I think it's a great idea.

Done but it says it may take a day to kick in. Will the system reduce the resolution because I downloaded about 3mb file

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The fact that both salespeople (I won’t call them artists) use underhanded, PT Barnum style techniques to force their work on naive buyers does not bear comparison to what Van Gogh, Gauguin or Picasso may have done during their lifetimes. Kinkade and Lik’s success is purely monetary, certainly not artistic.

Kincaide has millions of followers who love his work. It inspires them. Who are you to say it's not art? The definition of art is something that inspires, changes ones mental, emotional and spiritual feelings. Many of Kincade's followers have religious experiences from his work. Yet somehow, you know better than them.

Lik's work is rather common as there are many today who do good landscape work, often better than Lik. But he has the additional talent to commercialize his work and to know how to present it such as by back lighting, that makes it worth thousands of dollars. How many artists have the business sense and guts to invest millions in their own galleries around the workl to sell their work, and have that level of confidence? Most go to galleries or museums and beg these businesspeople who are manipulating the prices for them to represent them. So Lik takes on the business part of the art business that other artists here think are beneath them yet are very happy when these businesspeople sell their work at whatever level they can connive. There's an awful lot of false humility going on around here.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Well, there has been some misunderstanding about the philosophical connotations of having ones work done by others under guidance, versus the legal connotations. Even Ansel Adams farmed out his big mural printing work to a big commercial lab in SF better equipped for that than his own little darkroom was. And numerous artists like Damien Hirst (like him or not) have resorted to specialized craftsmen when upscaling the size of projects. That kind of lack of personal "hands-on" thing can be debated, but there's nothing inherently illegal about it.

What is illegal is deliberate misrepresentation. For example, there was a gallery in Carmel dedicated to the oil painting seascapes of a famous French painter of such and such a name (which I don't remember). People were being encouraged to buy his seascapes because these had great value in that particular genre. But that person didn't even exist! It was all being done by an assembly line in Mexico without any kind of significant artist oversight - basically a complete misrepresentation and scam. So the FBI eventually jumped on that pretty hard. Those paintings weren't cheap (even though they didn't look very impressive to me), and buyers were infuriated once they discovered they had been suckered.

Likewise, there was nothing inherently wrong in how Kincade invented a means to mass-produce basically posters at an exceptionally high level of quality. That included his fancy paint by numbers templates which allowed other workmen to fill in the colors in order to match clients own decor schemes. But when he tried to skirt the law by just adding a spot of two of his own paint, with his own hand, onto those, and then claiming that made each of them "original" paintings of high collector value (as deliberately implied by his sales agents), that was tempting the law to take a closer look at what was really involved, because many people were being deceived into paying unrealistically high prices for what they thought was a limited collector commodity, but which turned out to be mass-produced.

And that sudden awakening turned into a domino effect, and undercut his momentum right when he was financially overextended trying to expand his business empire into Kincade-theme real estate development too. So as the whole ball of yarn was collapsing, he resorted to conning and stiffing his own franchisees, cheating them, and that's when the FBI finally swung down the hammer.

I suspect it's just a matter of time, when it comes to Peter Lik too. Sooner or later, people like that get emboldened enough to think they can get away with anything. In the Vegas area, the FBI has much bigger fish to fry than him. But if a lot of consumer complaints start coming in from disillusioned buyers, something might happen. But in his case, lots of those rich types simply don't care. If tired of their $40,000 sofa, they just throw it out and buy another one. Same with a big piece of framed decor on the wall. They aren't really art collectors at all, but mostly conspicuous consumption types with giant indoor walls needing to be covered with something.

So they both may be crooks. But they are also artists.

 

[koraks]

Done but it says it may take a day to kick in. Will the system reduce the resolution because I downloaded about 3mb file

It works! Looking good, I like it.

 

[Pieter12]

Yet somehow, you know better than them.

I do.

But he has the additional talent to commercialize his work and to know how to present it such

He has the talent to extract money from simple-minded dupes.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Kincaide has millions of followers who love his work. It inspires them. Who are you to say it's not art?

Basically anyone with a brain can see that Kincade's work was not art, just a scam. Certainly plenty of district attorneys agree just for starters.

 

[Mike Lopez]

I do.


He has the talent to extract money from simple-minded dupes.

Yeah, but some people like to hang their Kinkade (it's amazing how many people can't seem to spell his name correctly--especially his big advocate in this thread) "paintings" over their matching couch with the stack of Joel Osteen books on the side table.

Besides, where would the world be if there weren't a sucker born every minute?

 

[DREW WILEY]

I couldn't care less if I spell it right or not.

And of course a label such as "artist" can mean absolutely anything or absolutely nothing, just like the term "art" itself.
Everyone is allowed their own definition, or to spend their money and decorate their house as they please. But their are certain rules. When someone has their favorite rap music "artist" cranked up to full volume at 2:AM in the morning, and I can't sleep, I call the cops because it's a violation of city code. When someone misrepresents the provenance, quantity, or "investment" value of pictures they sell, there are enforceable laws in certain States against that kind of thing too,
and if not, certainly interested lawsuit lawyers.