I’ve decided that I need a nemesis.
A commenter recently suggested that
His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands could be my nemesis, but I don’t know. It feels like settling to me. Monkeyhands isn’t up to being my Joker or Lex Luthor. Maybe if he,
Human Inertia,
Stoner, and three of my other worst bosses got together, they could be my
Sinister Six, but that’s about as much credit as I’m willing to give them.
A great nemesis can’t be an idiot; he has to be brilliant but twisted – someone who has the power to accomplish great things, but uses that power only for his own demented ends. Someone like Darth Vader or Hans Gruber from Die Hard. Or Thomas Kinkade.
Yes, you heard me right. I have selected as my nemesis Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light®.
If you’re not familiar with this “artist,” he’s best known as the man who has produced essentially the same painting 8,436 times over the past 20 years. Kinkade-land is a place filled with cottages almost militantly cozy, a place where it has always just rained, but it never rains. There is no sun in Kinkade-land – only an endless panorama of supernaturally illuminated clouds. It is a place where human beings, if they are seen at all, are represented only in the distance as Ice-Skating Boy or Man on Horse, never as individuals with names or identities. Judging from the freakish glow emanating from the cottages, the people in Kinkade's paintings are probably too busy stoking their fireplaces and lighting the drapes on fire to be seen outdoors.
Let me be clear: Kinkade’s talent is undeniable. If you’re looking for someone to paint a rain-slicked street, he’s your man. But somewhere along the line Kinkade went from competent landscape painter to billion dollar bullshit artist.
Saying that Kinkade has sold out is like saying that the Nazis lost track of what National Socialism was all about. First of all, any artist who comes up with his own trademarked tagline has preemptively surrendered any claim at creative integrity. What kind of artist devises a particular style and then essentially announces that he’s never going to progress beyond that style for the rest of his life? It’s a sort of deliberate artistic retardation, like if the Beatles had decided in 1964 to be the She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah Group®. Although maybe Van Gogh would have had better luck if he had marketed himself as Painter of Swirls®.
Kinkade found something that works, and is sticking with it. I’ve never seen a Kinkade painting of a bowl of fruit or Madonna with child. I’m not sure he could paint a portrait of a human being if he had a gun to his head. Can you have no desire to push yourself, to learn or produce anything new, and still call yourself an artist? I don’t know, but you can make a hell of a lot of money.
At this point Kinkade is a cottage industry (ha!) that is almost entirely independent of the creation of original paintings. Kinkade “originals” are turned out at a rate of nearly 500 a day at a factory in California. His paintings are digitally photographed, transferred onto a plastic-like surface and glued onto canvas. Each print features a nominal contribution by “highlight artists,” assembly-line workers who add a dash of color here and there. This unique touch allows Kinkade to charge up to $10,000 for what are essentially Xerox copies of original paintings. Prints that have had Kinkade’s signature mechanically etched into them – complete with DNA sample – go for quite a bit more.
I frankly don’t begrudge his selling insanely overpriced carbon copies of mediocre paintings by the horse-drawn buggy-load. If I could take a dump in a paper bag and sell it to morons for $10,000, I have to admit I’d be sorely tempted.
What galls me about Kinkade is the way he equates his greeting card sentimentality with Christianity – thereby elevating his cynical, manipulative, greed-driven business practices to the level of “evangelism.” God knows what luminescent cottages and glittering cobblestones have to do with the gospel, but to Kinkade it’s all one big fuzzy package. Go to the Lighthouses wing of Kinkade’s online gallery and you’ll be greeted with the message:
The power of a towering lighthouse, the unforgiving force of the storming sea, and the bravery of a sailor’s perseverance, all remind us of God’s strength.
If you’re like me, you vomited a little in your mouth when you read that. For starters, it reads like it was written by a fifth grade girl. The first sentence, if you remove the modifiers, reads “power…reminds us… of strength.” Yeah, I wonder why that is. Maybe because they’re
synonyms? “Bravery of… perseverance” is a phrase devoid of any meaning. And then there’s the intellectual laziness of postulating that every element of the painting symbolizes the exact same thing:
“Jimmy, can you tell me what the lighthouse signifies in this painting?”
“Ummm... God’s strength?”
“Very good! And the storming sea?”
“Errrr... God’s strength?”
“Excellent! And how about the –”
“God’s strength?”
Way to go, Jimmy. You could write copy for the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light® website, telling the adoring public exactly what each of Kinkade’s paintings make us feel. So far I’ve learned that God is brave, powerful, stormy and unforgiving. Man, who needs the New Testament when you’ve got the gospel according to greeting card art?
The best art, in my opinion, is the kind that asks no questions and creates no uncertainty. True art is about creating graphical representations of objects calculated to provoke a specific, predetermined response.
Wait, did I say ‘art’? I meant ‘pornography.’
Thomas Kinkade isn’t an artist. He’s a purveyor of pornography. And the worst kind of pornography, at that: the kind without any naked people doing it.
Thomas Kinkade and Michael Bay have each had exactly one original idea – and it’s the same idea: to make a billion dollars off the way light refracts off pavement. But at least there’s no Michael Bay gallery at the local megachurch, and at the end of a Michael Bay show a lot of shit blows up.
I won’t even bother to go into what a complete ass-hat Kincade is on a personal level. You can research that yourself. Suffice it to say that Kinkade once said that Picasso “had a talent but didn't use it in any significant way.” Presumably Picasso wasted too much time trying out new things, and never bothered to come up with a catchy tagline, like “Painter of Cubes®.”
Painter of Light®, my ass. Thom, you’re the Painter of Light Porn®. Hell, you don’t even rise to the level of Michael Bay. You’re the Shannon Tweed of oil painters.
F--- you, Thomas Kinkade.
Labels: Christianity, Pop Culture, Rants