Thomas Kinkade's death

[Sirius Glass]

I'll respect the person if, and only if, I respect WHAT they did and HOW they did it. I respect neither in Kinkade's case. If "great success" is your benchmark, do you also respect the people who run drug cartels?

Well said!

 

[Old-N-Feeble]

I can't do what he did either from the artistic aspect or the financial aspect. Can any of you critics best him? And, by the way, what are the critics' credentials here?

This absolutely looks like jealousy to me. As I stated before I didn't care for his work but he made many people happy and he became filthy rich for it.

Jealousy...

 

[Sirius Glass]

I can't do what he did either from the artistic aspect or the financial aspect... can any of you? This absolutely looks like jealousy to me. Like I stated before... I didn't care for his work. But he made many people happy and he became filthy rich for it. Jealousy...

Not jealously! Drug dealers make people happy and they come filthy rich! So you admire drug dealers too?

 

[Old-N-Feeble]

Sirius... are you serious? What does drug dealing have to do with visual art? You're WAY off base.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

Here's art critic Jerry Saltz on Kincades work.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/04/jerry-saltz-on-thomas-kinkade-1958-2012.html

 

[blansky]

I can't do what he did either from the artistic aspect or the financial aspect. Can any of you critics best him? And, by the way, what are the critics' credentials here?

This absolutely looks like jealousy to me. As I stated before I didn't care for his work but he made many people happy and he became filthy rich for it.

Jealousy...

You're starting to troll.

A number of us have explained our position and that has to do with his banal paintings, but mostly has to do with his assembly line work and his business practices.

Stating "jealous" in each of your posts, when that aspect has been explained to you is merely trolling for a reaction.

 

[blansky]

Gotta admit, I love the financial bunko aspect of all this. Maybe it WAS art....a kind of performance art for the Wall Street rip-off goo-goo-fundamentalist anti-intellectual kitsch-swilling early 21st Century America-in-decline reality we all inhabit. Heck of a sentence, that.

I think you nailed it.

 

[Darkroom317]

I can't do what he did either from the artistic aspect or the financial aspect. Can any of you critics best him? And, by the way, what are the critics' credentials here?

This absolutely looks like jealousy to me. As I stated before I didn't care for his work but he made many people happy and he became filthy rich for it.

Jealousy...

Not that it means much but I am a senior art student. I look at and make art on a daily basis. I paint nearly every day.

 

[Sirius Glass]

You're starting to troll.

You nailed it.

 

[Old-N-Feeble]

You nailed it.

Who's the "troll"? One with something positive to say about another person... or one with something negative to say?

 

[k_jupiter]

I think O-N-F is the reincarnation of TK.

Personally, I have said not much about the poor bastard. His work sucks, his business plan sucks. Period.

Me? I have achieved partially what I wanted to do.. I please MYSELF. Partially? I ain't dead yet.

Unlike TK.

RIP.

And yes, his family will laugh all the way to the bank. But his crap is still crap.

tim in san jose

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

Credentials? In the case of Kinkade, the "absence" of credentials makes one more qualified to pass judgment than being a credentialed critic. After all, he was fond of doing a Palin-esque "oooh- look at the liberal establishment, oppressing the masses" plaint whenever anyone challenged his work on artistic merits.

As for credentials for myself to critique, well, I've spent quite a bit of time looking at original works of art in places like the National Gallery of Art (DC), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), the Prado (Madrid), the Uffizi (Florence), to name a few. I also did a series of studies of Renaissance painting and drawing as part of my interdisciplinary Renaissance studies program at Johns Hopkins University, where I got my bachelors degree, and completed seven graduate-level courses in photography at Maryland Institute College of Art.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I think Thomas Kinkade went to UC Berkeley and to the Art Center in Pasadena. The Art Center, correct me if I'm wrong is primarily a school for commercial art. I worked for a few photographers that went there. It's an excellent school.

 

[michaelbsc]

Gotta admit, I love the financial bunko aspect of all this. Maybe it WAS art....a kind of performance art for the Wall Street rip-off goo-goo-fundamentalist anti-intellectual kitsch-swilling early 21st Century America-in-decline reality we all inhabit. Heck of a sentence, that.

I think you nailed it.

+1

 

[polyglot]

I can't believe* we have here a 17-page thread on whether Kinkade was "Art" with a capital A. From the Saltz/Vulture piece:

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none — not one — of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliché and already told.

Can we not separate the concepts of "painting" and "art"? He sold interior decorations and he was highly successful at it; just because he sold paintings doesn't mean he meant for them to be capital-A Art. He didn't claim to be breaking new ground or anything, he painted (or had people paint) things to make his customers happy, and it worked extremely well for him. What amuses me is that this so offends the self-proclaimed "art world", that someone dare to use a medium they hold dear for something other than pushing an envelope or whatever, that there is a collective urge to hate on Kinkade and his output.

And why the hate here? I see a hell of a lot of cliched barn / lighthouse / sunset photos even on APUG that fall way short of the standards that people seem to want to apply to Kinkade (seemingly only because he chose paint as his medium), yet we don't beat up on APUGgers in the gallery because why? Because they're not financially successful and therefore worthy of jealousy? We recognise the Art-vs-interior-decoration distinction in considering our own work and deciding what to put on the loungeroom wall, why get angsty when someone else does the same?


* yeah OK, this is APUG. I believe it.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

The difference is that those amateur sunset/lighthouse/barn photos here are never put forward as "art" with or without a capital A. However, when you title yourself "The Painter of Light" or some such pompous nonsense you had better be able to back it up. The only thing Kinkade was able to back up was the truck he used to haul off a lot of unwise people's cash. He sold his "paintings" as "art" to people unsophisticated enough to think that what they were buying was investment grade - they had heard the terms "limited edition", "original oil" and "collectible" before and when they were tacked on to what he was pumping out, they thought they were not just buying a pretty poster for the wall, but something they could pass on to their kids who would get not only aesthetic benefit but financial benefit as well. There was an implicit association between his work and other actual investment-grade art (Picasso, Van Gogh, Vermeer) - it had to be "art" to make it investment grade. So he himself created the false impression that what he was producing was "art". The reality was of course a different matter altogether. As you said before, he was making home decor at best.

The massive hate-on for Kinkade has nothing to do with jealousy - it has to do with the combined effects of his incredibly disingenuous and/or corrupt business practices and the butchering of actual art that he executed. It's not because his work fails as "modern" art, therefore isn't "art". For me, painting starts losing steam somewhere around post-impressionism and by abstract expressionism I'm about disinterested, and most truly contemporary work leaves me antarctic-grade cold. If Soviet Realism had a torrid affair with Impressionism, and the love child that was born showed that in actual fact they were first cousins by combining the worst sins of both, that would be Kinkade: "It's fuzzy, has dramatic light that makes no sense, and spouts dogmatic, 'uplifting' propaganda at every turn!".

 

[CGW]

I can't believe* we have here a 17-page thread on whether Kinkade was "Art" with a capital A. From the Saltz/Vulture piece:


Can we not separate the concepts of "painting" and "art"? He sold interior decorations and he was highly successful at it; just because he sold paintings doesn't mean he meant for them to be capital-A Art. He didn't claim to be breaking new ground or anything, he painted (or had people paint) things to make his customers happy, and it worked extremely well for him. What amuses me is that this so offends the self-proclaimed "art world", that someone dare to use a medium they hold dear for something other than pushing an envelope or whatever, that there is a collective urge to hate on Kinkade and his output.

And why the hate here? I see a hell of a lot of cliched barn / lighthouse / sunset photos even on APUG that fall way short of the standards that people seem to want to apply to Kinkade (seemingly only because he chose paint as his medium), yet we don't beat up on APUGgers in the gallery because why? Because they're not financially successful and therefore worthy of jealousy? We recognise the Art-vs-interior-decoration distinction in considering our own work and deciding what to put on the loungeroom wall, why get angsty when someone else does the same?


* yeah OK, this is APUG. I believe it.

Amen. Strikes me as a new low for APUG.

 

[removed account4]

----

i agree cgw ...

 

[blansky]

Well if we didn't have "new lows" how would we be able to recognize the new highs?

Besides, we've always discussed to death various works and their perpetrators here. Nothing new.

If the thread offends someone, don't read it.

 

[E. von Hoegh]

I was trying to make a point. Why disrespect a person after they're dead? He had unprecedented success. How else should we interpret such hatred and disrespect?

Michael Jackson also had unprecedented success. And look at all those young boys he made happy!

You throw a lot of words, such as "hatred" "happiness" "disrespect" and "jealousy" around in a manner that indicates that you don't really understand their meanings.

 

[SuzanneR]

Maybe enough has been said on this topic? I'm tempted to close it, so let's keep it civil.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

that would be Kinkade: "It's fuzzy, has dramatic light that makes no sense, and spouts dogmatic, 'uplifting' propaganda at every turn!".

What wrong with opiate for the masses? Here's another opiate that doesn't claim to be art but way cheaper.

http://www.successories.com/?gclid=CLHS2NPQua8CFakERQodYBLDkA

There's something that an antidote for the fake inspirational decorations.

Dead Link Removed

The cost of art and who buys expensive art is indicative of who has the disposable income. A great movie showing excessive money and art is the movie Basquiat. When the economy booms, the oily art purveys come out of the wood work.

 

[CGW]

Maybe enough has been said on this topic? I'm tempted to close it, so let's keep it civil.

It went silly way upstream. I'd close it.

 

[blansky]

It went silly way upstream. I'd close it.

Or, stop reading it.

It will die on it's own.....they all do.

 

[pbromaghin]

If the thread offends someone, don't read it.

+1