Sensible Erection | Kinkade™

Thursday, 20 November 2008

quote [ "He'll have a bestseller on his hands. " Laura Miller, Salon.com ]

...because "His appalling new novel, "The Painter of Light™," makes a strong bid to become the world champion of vapid, money-grubbing kitsch" doesn't have quite the right tone for the rave pages in the paperback version.

I wish I could be like David Watts.

[humour] [by zkhan@4:35amGMT] [+5 Funny]

Comments

Jewbacchus said @ 4:43am GMT on 20th Nov [Score:4 Funny]

anger_die said @ 5:32am GMT on 20th Nov
Damn, that makes me want to fuck his car.

DirtyBirdy said @ 6:33am GMT on 20th Nov
ho

f00m@nB@r said @ 4:53am GMT on 20th Nov
he has a movie???

HoZay said @ 7:32am GMT on 20th Nov
With Peter O'Toole, even.

chard said @ 11:02am GMT on 20th Nov
Gag me with a (jewel-encrusted) spatula.

Bodnoirbabe said @ 5:23pm GMT on 20th Nov
God that looked really sappy and formulaic. Bitch didn't even look poor and they're acting like she's this poor little woman who needs a roof. Whatever. That movie is shit.

sanepride said @ 5:03am GMT on 20th Nov
Maybe he can bail out GM.

DirtyBirdy said @ 6:16am GMT on 20th Nov
While I know you were joking, let's do some holy-shit-that's-a-lot math on that.

Sales from Kinkade were about 130 million last year. Factoring in rent at the mall, promotion, and production costs, let's figure that even 100 million of that was pure generic-art profit.

GM is asking for two hundred and fifty times that.

Wow.

Hactar said @ 5:05am GMT on 20th Nov
Er, +1 Old. I hadn't read this, but it is from 2002.

Still modding up.

anger_die said @ 5:26am GMT on 20th Nov
Was Laura Miller a spurned lover of Kinkade's? Jesus, what a bitch.

arctan said @ 5:33am GMT on 20th Nov
Anyone who's graduated from college in the humanities or fine arts is basically obligated to hate this guy. He represents everything that we snotty highbrows see as making the rest of America inferior.

Dragons_wine said @ 5:48am GMT on 20th Nov
He paints such pretty non-art!

Azoth said @ 7:47am GMT on 20th Nov [Score:1 Underrated]
Kinkade would be nowhere near so offensive to thinking people if he made no pretensions about the fact that he just makes cutesy pictures for people with a pastel color fetish.

Still, I do find the kind of people who love his art incredibly creepy, and the author did an excellent job of identifying why. Most people just look at his art a while and experience the aesthetic equivalent of eating a bowl of sugar instead of lunch. However, the kind of people who are his ardent fans seem to have an almost pathological craving for pleasantness, so much so you start to wonder what the fuck is wrong with them.

arctan said @ 8:16am GMT on 20th Nov
It's his prints and Precious Moments figurines that are the number one reason liberal arts grads like me become deeply uncomfortable upon visiting our conservative parents' homes for any length of time.

I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where Ned Flanders moves to a town that's a literal incarnation of Precious Moments brought to life and finds it too cloying and saccharine even for him (they want him to shave his mustache).

What's creepy is how Kinkade defines himself as "The Painter of Light" and his paintings as being an evocation of "love, love, love" without any irony. Because it's frightening to see a vision of "light" that implies sourceless, ambient glow with no shadow. Almost as frightening as an image of "love" that's an inchoate diffuse pleasantness with no principles, no choices, no challenges, no meaning.

arctan said @ 8:18am GMT on 20th Nov
Also, it's just the tiniest bit weird that his entire fortune is predicated on his self-presentation as a modern-day Norman Rockwell, and yet he's also the guy who gets drunk and publicly gropes women, screams obscenities and disrupts Siegfried and Roy shows in his off hours.

chard said @ 10:59am GMT on 20th Nov
Everybody needs a hobby.

maryyugo said @ 5:49pm GMT on 20th Nov
"What's creepy is how Kinkade defines himself ..."

yup-- while others define him as the kentucky fried chicken/mcdonald's of art.

teknokracy said @ 5:43am GMT on 20th Nov

Dioxin said @ 11:23am GMT on 20th Nov [Score:1 Funny]
The grand collection

anger_die said @ 5:46pm GMT on 20th Nov
Shit I'd hang on the walls if I were to start a dental practice...

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

edwardflinch said @ 5:59am GMT on 20th Nov [Score:3]
Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck

Garr123 said @ 11:54am GMT on 20th Nov
I don't appreciate that article mentioning Kinkade and Rockwell in the same sentence.

Hipatitis! said @ 12:56pm GMT on 20th Nov
Umm... Wow. Right.

Ranma_Saotome said @ 1:04pm GMT on 20th Nov
Wow. That is, like, so the opposite of Dogme 95.

balzac said @ 11:51pm GMT on 20th Nov
Even the original creators of that movement still put their names on their works, which I think is point the sixth of "what not to do."

Dink said @ 6:32am GMT on 20th Nov
This guy sucks so bad, why am I seeing these very same links every-god-damn-where?

It's a shame I have to choose between overrated, shameless self-link, troll, boring, or WTF.

Hazel said @ 6:55am GMT on 20th Nov
The article mentioned the Kinkade-themed housing development. The link in the article was broken, so I went looking for more information. Key piece being that the development's website does not mention the Kinkade connection.

Map is here: http://www.zillow.com/homes/map/hiddenbrooke-parkway,-vallejo,-ca_rb/

thizzwardo said @ 9:04am GMT on 20th Nov
thomas kinkaid, painter of blight.

chard said @ 11:15am GMT on 20th Nov
HL Mencken (possibly quoting PT Barnum):

Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Vapid campy kitschy dreck sells, and not only to the lower 49%. Two of my older relatives, women of education and achievement (an ornithologist and a classical musician), treasure their few Kinkades. Maybe these sisters, who grew up hungry in the 1930s, are secretly the damaged souls the reviewer refers to, seeking solace for rough childhoods. Ask Dr Jung.

Omagus23 said @ 12:01pm GMT on 20th Nov
One of my parent's friends dated Kinkade while she was in college. She said he drank, had a temper, and generally sucked at life.

Fenny said @ 12:41pm GMT on 20th Nov
Sounds like me.

Hipatitis! said @ 12:52pm GMT on 20th Nov
Fenny = Kinkade ?

Saint_Marck said @ 12:54pm GMT on 20th Nov
It's almost like we're the same person.

Hipatitis! said @ 12:56pm GMT on 20th Nov
Fenny = Saint Marck ??

Hactar said @ 3:20pm GMT on 20th Nov
Kinkade= Saint March ???

damnit said @ 4:33pm GMT on 20th Nov
Thomas Kinkade gave this memo to everyone on set of "Painter of Light"on how to make it have the "Kinkade" look. It went straight to DVD.

damnit said @ 4:34pm GMT on 20th Nov
Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck

damnit said @ 4:35pm GMT on 20th Nov
damnit... been posted before.

-_- said @ 4:40pm GMT on 20th Nov
Lol, my wife hates Kincaid and will love some of the links and comments in this thread :)

Bodnoirbabe said @ 5:29pm GMT on 20th Nov [Score:1 Insightful]
Thomas Kinkade is the Velvet Elvis of this age.

sacrelicious said @ 12:51am GMT on 21st Nov
since I think there's more merit, if only just, in kinkade's work then that could represent a slight increase in the overall quality of our worst popular art as a culture.

sacrelicious said @ 12:51am GMT on 21st Nov
than a velvet elvis, that is.

Rainbow Randolf said @ 9:30pm GMT on 20th Nov
I suppose Stephanie Meyer is the new Kinkade....

arctan said @ 12:36am GMT on 21st Nov
She pisses off members of my generation less because we're not old enough to have 13-year-old daughters so it's easier for us to totally ignore her.

Supreme_Coconut said @ 12:47am GMT on 21st Nov
No, Rainbow Randolf, you are the new Kinkade.

sacrelicious said @ 12:23am GMT on 21st Nov
I recall a great aunt had a set of Thomas Kinkade knick-knacks called "a charles dickens christmas"

it was all happy and pretty an' shit, just like in charles dickens' novels!

/irony

arctan said @ 12:40am GMT on 21st Nov
Yes. Marketers tend to focus with laser precision on the happy, sappy parts of A Christmas Carol, ignoring the hard-edged cynicism and nastiness and terrifying portentous ghosts passing judgment and doom on humanity that give the sappy stuff any weight at all.

It's like how It's A Wonderful Life -- and Frank Capra generally -- get unfairly slammed by snarky modern cynics because the only part of the movie they remember is the happy ending and not the unrelenting dinginess and dreariness and tawdriness that George Bailey has to slog through to get there. (Not just the dystopia of Pottersville -- a lot of people forget that if we strip out the supernatural stuff that bookends the movie, the bulk of the movie between the beginning and the ending, for all its moments of schmaltz, is still a fairly realistic and grim-eyed look at the struggle of Depression-era life.)

sacrelicious said @ 12:42am GMT on 21st Nov
It's A Wonderful Life get's slammed because it's notoriously overplayed and everyone's sick of it.

Jewbacchus said @ 1:01am GMT on 21st Nov
I've never seen it.

Really.

-_- said @ 1:36am GMT on 21st Nov
Well, you're Jewish.

arctan said @ 2:01am GMT on 21st Nov
Well, yes, and A Christmas Carol even more so.

No work of art survives being turned into an "institution" very well. I'm just saying beyond the kitsch there was something worthwhile that got people to like it in the first place, that's now obscured by that same kitsch.

mthrndr said @ 1:03am GMT on 21st Nov
Kinkade sounds like something that should be screamed in anguish....

KINKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DarkShadowRavenDragonGrrl69 said @ 2:00am GMT on 21st Nov
Close enough.

jarringpeach said @ 2:12am GMT on 21st Nov
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!!!!!

ethanos said @ 8:46am GMT on 21st Nov
Painter of Bad Stagesets. It touches a collective nerve, does it not, that financial success is bestowed upon a charlatan preying upon the vague notions of self-expression through brand name recognition? Like a t-shirt with a goofy but recognizable phrase, that NOBODY would wear if they actually stopped to think about it, the Kinkaide becomes a type of t-shirt for your walls that (for most of us unwashed) is only a teeny step away from, say, Monet----in that we are awed first by graphic mastery (how did he DO that?), and second by that warm, fuzzy feeling of the, uh, CONTENT which we actually want visitors in our home to witness as the representation of me.

The fun part, it seems, is vainly trying to unmask the scam. Aid to kink, indeed.