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Thomas Kinkade: Master of Light
By Jonah Lehrer • January 30, 2002 at 10:00 AM
By Jonah Lehrer • January 30, 2002 at 10:00 AM
Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light," is the most popular painter in history. Period. Since 1989, more than ten million people have bought a genuine Thomas Kinkade. He has founded a public company, Media Arts Group (traded on the New York Stock Exchange, symbol MDA) and turned it into the largest art-based company in the world. There are over 350 Thomas Kinkade signature galleries in malls everywhere, over 5000 retail outlets selling Kinkade licensed products (my favorite is the Kinkade La-Z-Boy, featuring a painting entitled "It Doesn't Get Much Better Than This"). Last year his company generated over $130 million in revenue. Monet, eat your heart out.
But to be honest, comparing Kinkade and Monet (or any other painter for that matter) is not actually fair: after all, Monet had to paint his paintings. Kinkade, in the philanthropic interest of "engulfing as many hearts as possible with art" decided original art was overrated, and, beginning in 1990, pioneered the process of high quality digital reproductions of his paintings on stretched canvas, preserving the texture of the canvas.
These canvas reproductions, authenticated as real Kinkade paintings by a vaguely explained "double referencing authorization system featuring DNA technology," can be sold as is or can be further enhanced by the touch of a master highlighter (Studio Proof), a personal apprentice to Kinkade (Renaissance Edition) or by Kinkade himself (the Masters Edition, at select galleries only, prices beginning at $32,000).
The professional Highlighters who personalize your painting are trained in a weeklong seminar on the intricacies of the life and art of Kinkade. You like puppy dogs? With a simple dab of perfectly placed paint, a puppy dog in the window can be accentuated and ushered into the glowing foreground.
And the foregrounds always seem to be glowing. Kinkade is, after all "the painter of light." Regardless of the specific painting series--his paintings seem to fall into easily marketed thematic periods, from the "Impressionistic" to an entire series on "Gazebos"--the "light" in question is unwavering, uniformly warm and romantic, belonging not to a specific moment of the day but to a concept of light derived from some naive, religious feeling. The paintings, to borrow a line from the QVC Thomas Kinkade show, "really glow"--an effect that is achieved by "layering the paint." Kinkade brags about layering paint as if he were the first painter to think of it.
But regardless of how the effect is achieved, "the glow" has become Kinkade's trademark and the main reason his galleries are full of personal testimonials seeking to explain the "intense emotional experience of a Thomas Kinkade painting" (that particular line is from Linda in New Jersey).
And Linda from New Jersey is not alone. My visit to the Kinkade gallery at the South Street Seaport happened to coincide with the visit of a Master Highlighter, filling the small gallery with a crowd rivaling Met attendance during the Jackie Kennedy costume exhibit. Families gazed in hushed silence at the paintings while serene muzak played in the background. A woman started crying in front of a florescent landscape entitled "Blossom Hill Church." She said the church reminded her of the country church from her hometown. A salesman immediately rushed over to her with a tissue and explained how the church was actually based on the wedding chapel where Kinkade was married. The neon flowers in the foreground which the woman so admired--the flowers were glowing, of course--were Kinkade's wife's favorite flower, tulips.
The personal biography of Kinkade is thinly veiled beneath the digitally reproduced surface of all his paintings. His art is loaded: not only of symbolic references to his family (the letter ëN' is hidden in every painting as a "love note to his wife Nannette") but to religion as well. His artistic style was fundamentally changed by his Christian awakening at the age of 20. The gallery assistants use every opportunity to emphasize this hidden complexity, dutifully explaining in precise detail how the sentimental Hometown Bridge represents "the deeper meaning within bridges, those ravine spanning passages we make in life; graduations, first love, marriage, the birth of a child." The bridge, you see, is only a metaphor.
Metaphor or no metaphor, art critics have been brutal in their reaction to Kinkade. They have reserved for him the most severe of criticisms: silence. In the eyes of most cultural critics, Kinkade, the most popular painter in history, simply does not exist. He has sold 10 million paintings but he is not yet worthy of a critical comment. The Met does not sell a Kinkade book (let alone that La-Z-Boy).
At best, Kinkade is seen as nothing but a marketing genius, the inventor not of "layers of paint" but of an "editions pyramid" that somehow justifies $1000 dollars for a nice Xerox copy. Kinkade, these critics believe, is like Warhol without the irony or philosophy. He is nothing but a cheap, commercial visionary who takes advantage of the middle class allure of art as pure commodity.
But in exiling Kinkade from the ëart establishment' aren't critics missing the real issue? It is undeniable that Kinkade's paintings reek of florescent sentimentalism. Even if he has outsold Monet 10,000 to 1, Kinkade is no Monet. But clearly, Kinkade is communicating something. People are moved by his paintings, crying openly in his galleries, spending thousands of dollars for highlighted pictures of gazebos. If nothing else, Kinkade is filling a cultural void. The masses, the proletariat, Linda in New Jersey, all love art. They want to be moved by art. They want art in their homes, enriching their daily lives. So where do they turn? Who do they hang on their walls? The success of Kinkade is more than anything else a testament to the failure of modern art to connect with a public, to be relevant, to be appealing.
It is easy, too easy, to simply dismiss Thomas Kinkade as a fake artist, as a QVC salesman selling religious Hallmark cards. The silence of art critics on the issue of Kinkade is little more than a defense mechanism, a way to avoid the far harder discussion on the dismal isolation of contemporary art. It is important to ask our cultural intelligentsia why a painting that makes people cry is not art but a blank canvas with a single yellow dot in the middle is art.
If ten million satisfied customers can't expand the definition of "art" then who or what can? It is easy to be condescending. The harder question is trying to understand the source of our great cultural divide. How did we reach a point where the most popular painter in history does not have a painting in a single museum? Has contemporary visual art forgotten its public?
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