If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then art review is surely the most subjective of evaluations. And everyone’s a critic.
Like those who admit they know nothing about art but feel free to proclaim they know what they like.
Apparently this country is full of collectors who know nothing about art. That would be the only logical explanation for the sales success of Thomas Kinkade, the self-anointed “Painter of Light.”
His cookie-cutter depictions of landscapes, street scenes and cottages on country lanes would be right at home next to the artsy-craftsy kitsch of tourist gift shops. Right up there with chia pets and quilted toilet roll covers.
Kinkade’s prints on paper and canvas, always in ornate gilded frames, are never found in museums or legitimate art galleries. What it took to peddle this stuff as “art” is a marketing strategy both brilliant and ruthless, with a heavy promotion of his Christian faith. That’s right! God made him do it. The Lord guides his brush. A bit of unintelligent design?
What’s finally landed Kinkade in deep legal doo-doo is not that he’s a lousy artist or that he blames this on God. He’s accused of defrauding investors in his franchise galleries that sell nothing but his prints. Disputes between Kinkade’s company and gallery operators are settled by arbitration. After three cases were settled in favor of the company, an arbitration panel last month awarded two former owners of failed galleries in Virginia $860,000.
The cases against Kinkade focused not only on unethical business practices that plaintiffs say forced them into bankruptcy, they also said his boorish behavior while drunk belied his heavily promoted image of Christian faith and family values. Since his appeal seems to be more to the faithful than to serious art collectors, this would adversely affect sales. Though the art was once sold exclusively by the Signature galleries, one former dealer says she’s now trying to recoup her failed investment reselling prints on E-Bay.
Former gallery owners say Kinkade used his faith, and manipulated theirs, to get them to invest in the galleries. Executives of his company then forced them to buy more galleries in over-saturated markets by threatening to open their own outlets nearby. Nice.
There was also the allegation that Kinkade deliberately allowed the dealers to fail in order to drive down the stock price of Kinkade, Media Arts Group, Inc. (then trading at about $25 a share), which he later bought back at $4 and renamed Thomas Kinkade Co.
But beyond his dodgy business practices, Kinkade’s personal conduct is what’s been brought to light, so to speak, during testimony. These include alleged groping of a female art dealer’s, um, pectoral muscles, at a signing party, causing her to gasp audibly and make a hasty exit. A former company executive also recounted a particularly nasty scene during a performance of Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas where an intoxicated Kinkade pointed at the performers’ leotards and shouted “Codpiece, codpiece.” He had to be subdued by his wife and his mother. Has he no shame?
And then there’s his penchant for urinating in public, which he doesn’t deny and laughingly passes off as “territorial marking.” In hotel elevators? Come on. He allegedly once urinated on a statue of Winnie the Pooh outside the Disneyland Hotel, saying, “This one’s for you, Walt.” Very funny.
What emerges from Kinkade’s legal battles is the image of a man who traded on his faith but flouted its ethical and moral responsibilities. Like Enron executives, he allegedly deliberately caused the financial ruin of associates to line his own pockets.
We can forgive him for being a painter of limited talent, for putting kitsch in a gilt frame and selling it as art. God will have to forgive him the rest, but only if he appears remorseful. And that may be the picture he can’t paint.