(Untitled)

[daphnep]

Over breakfast, Dan asked "do you think Thomas Kinkade's work will ever be in a real museum?"

"I hope so," I replied. "In fact, I'd like to curate that show, myself."

I told him what angle I'd like to take, and what context, and we mulled over speculative titles. I can already see the street-side banners:

Happy Little Trees: Duchamp to Kinkade

Comments

[low_delta]

I like it, but... Ross was known not for his paintings, but his teaching and his attitude. Ross's story is about the commercialization of painting, if anything.

I would say Norman Rockwell. Rockwell and Kinkade both play on nostalgia. But there's an interesting counterpoint between Kinkade and Norman Rockwell. Rockwell had impeccable technique, and tugged at your emotions with believable scenes drawn from idealized lives of families. Kinkade... didn't.

find the same comfort in ... clearly glowing cottages with picket-fenced gardens

Speak for yourself! ;-)

[daphnep]

I think we need Ross to get to Kincade.

For me it's not a straight line, from Warhol to Kincade, without the "happy little trees" and the idea of "anyone can make that, if they hold their brush just right."

And I won't speak for myself--I was thinking, rather, of this article:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2001-04-12/features/aaaiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee/

I asked myself, after writing this post, "What do I think, personally, of the paintings?" I looked long and hard at the little church picture I posted. I decided they're a little skeevy, to me. It's like a kid's book illustration, but without the story to go along with it, and geared for adults, which makes it unsettling...like an adult sitting on Santa's lap. In spite of my fascination, I take no comfort there.

[low_delta]

That's a perceptive take. I can't get past its skeeviness simply because people buy this crap? but that's the reason why they do, of course.

So you see a line between these artists? The "anyone can make art" ethos. How does this fit in with the commercialization and commodification of art?

[daphnep]

All of them (to my reading) set out to subvert the conventional art market. The conversation goes like this:

Duchamp: Anything can be art, art depends on context (the urinal and other "ready mades")

Warhol: Anything can be art, and art can be mass manufactured, and mass-manufactured art can be re-manufactured to make more art, and the whole jumble stands alone even outside of the artist's making (soup cans, silkscreens, Brillo boxes in museums today from production provenances after Warhol's death)

Bob Ross: Anyone can make art, and painting is all a trick of technique (if you just hold your brush right)

Kincade: If I hold my brush right (Ross), and then re-manufacture it(Warhol), and set factories to work reproducing it, Brillo-box style, and then reintroduce it in the gallery (Duchamp style) the definition of "art" changes once again.

[low_delta]

Hm. Subversion. Artists who brought art to the masses in a different way? Kinkade capitalized on mass marketing strategies more than probably any other artist had. He used channels like television sales networks. He had franchisees. He licensed his work extensively. And still presented himself as a fine artist.

You said it was not a straight line, but I'm not sure there's a line at all, between Warhol and Kinkade. Art has been mass-produced for centuries. One of Warhol's twists was that mass-production processes were not only the subjects of some of his art, but were used in creating it.

I can see the connection between him and Ross. According to Wikipedia, Kinkade got his start after doing a book called, The Artist's Guide to Sketching.

I still like the concept, I'm just not sure you can make it that linear.

[daphnep]

I think I can make it, but I need to work in my "exhibition" a little more--both content, and commentary. ;)

[ernunnos]

I would say Rockwell was more sentimental than nostalgic. When he was working, that was current. Malt shops existed. Small towns like that existed. Kids really did play baseball in vacant lots. Hell, quite a few of those paintings could have come from my childhood. Now it's nostalgic, of course, but originally it was just... rose tinted. The painted equivalent of Instagram pictures taken today. The source material is real, it's just got that sentimental glow.

[malkhos]

The antidote to any Rockwell picture is to ask, "So which of the characters belong to the Klan?"

[ernunnos]

Considering that most of his subjects were New Englanders... very few. In fact, it's likely that most of his models had ancestors who fought and lost life and limb to free the slaves.

[daphnep]

Oh! Interesting side note--a few of his models are still around, and at least a couple work at his museum in West Stockbridge. I've been there a few times, over the years, and on our most recent visit we met a docent who had modeled for a painting. (and fwiw, to make it relevant to this thread, he's black).

[malkhos]

There were plenty of Klansmen in New England. Worcester, Mass. was a notorious Klan Center in the 1920s. In any case, with his constant recycling of Tom Sawyer imagery, I always imagined Rockwell's fantasy world was Mid-Western, where the Klan was even more powerful than in the South. Perhaps you're retrojecting the Klan of the 1950s back in time, but it was an entirely different entity in the 1920s.

[daphnep]

I'm confused about your point. Rockwell's main body of work was the 1940's-60's, and furthermore he was a huge advocate of Civil Rights. What are you saying?

[malkhos]

He's painting later, but in my view is is invoking the a fantasy rural culture of a generation earlier. Although Rockwell did, as you say, he supported civil rights, the world he is idealizing did not. It may be that Rockwell's sanitized version of that past helps people to believe that racial discrimination was a problem of the 1950s or of the South

[daphnep]

Hmm. I can only suspect that you are not as familiar with Rockwell's work as you think you are. Racism and the issues surrounding it were nothing he shirked from, and even though it was commercial by original nature, his work also takes turn frankly addressing social issues. It's actually a fascinating commentary, particularly given his time. I'd say to you "Complicit, compared to who, among his peers?"

I'm referring not just to the painting linked above ("The Problem we all Live With") and "The Golden Rule", and the one I loved as a child, "Moving In". I'd say even more important are the many times he does paint non-white figures in his paintings, not as the central focus but as "incidental characters", porters, waiters, army men, workers, and others, I'd argue he was very conscious of the racial and class divides he was illustrating, and deliberate in his confrontation of that material.

[malkhos]

Look at the date of his civil rights pictures--well after the start of the civil rights movement. These pictures make it clear that he saw racism as an evil, while at the same time he was content to depict the all white fantasy world demanded by publishers during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and early 1940s

[daphnep]

With all due respect, I think that holding up Arnold Blanch as the true or predominant artistic voice of the culture and era, leaving Rockwell as a holdout, stretches it pretty far.