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I think taste in art is simply an acquired intuition of which experiences of art are ultimately beneficial to experience. I don’t like the idea of a “story” because this denies us from understanding art which includes wordless intuition, like music and architecture. There’s no need to develop a story about St Mark’s Square as it contains biologically determined indicators of beauty in the form of symmetry and motifs. I have no understanding of Chinese history and stories, and yet I can intuitively find beauty in Chinese architecture. No storytelling necessary. This is because of its innate visual beauty as determined by biological responses to visual stimuli. I am not Persian, but Persian rug patterns are beautiful.
Really, the judgment of art is objective according to subjectively-determined social values, with the addition of biologically-determined beneficial stimuli. A war-like culture enjoys art which speaks to the qualities which produce good warriors. Art in a communal culture will be different from art in a raw individualist capitalist culture. And so on. But a Soviet socialist can still find beauty in Norman Rockwell, just might conclude that in the whole the art is bad because of its consequences. I am especially dubious of “taste as telling stories” because our culture has an overproduction of bad storytellers who justify their salaries by word count: most humanities professors, most fiction writers, most journalists. In their little cannibalistic and solipsistic micro-culture, art that is bad for normal people is good for them, because by pontificating on it they can justify their class position. I truly hate these people.
Kinkade is an interesting case. This is art for lower and lower-middle Americans, who want to buy art when they go to the mall. It is visually easily to consume and it portrays scenes of happy domesticity. 2. In viewing this art, someone who works all day and tends to familial obligations in his down time can remember why he is doing this: for the rare moments of celebrations and joy which are experienced as a family in lower income America. This may occur on the toilet, and at an age when one’s eyes have decayed from overuse. (The oversaturation reminds me of World of Warcraft; likely optimizing for visual engagement and ease of visual differentiation). Before we criticize this art, we should consider which art would be more beneficial for these people to experience. I would say with confidence: nothing that the parisitic class produces in modern art galleries, modernist music, or modern literary circles. And actually, very little art in normal art galleries. Okay, they see something beautiful by Caravaggio, but unless they are religious then that fleeting animalistic noveltyslop feeling of “ooh interesting” is lost on them. Norman Rockwell? Sure! Rockwell is probably better than Kinkade at expressing moments of domestic American bliss. “They should be challenged” might say a pretentious person, but this class has genuinely no benefit to being challenged, and in facts need less stress, fewer challenges, more optimism and simple joy.
To understand Kinkade you have to understand how the art world actually works in terms of tastemaking. In today's visual age, where images are easily reproduced in books and magazines, on television, on the internet, and everywhere else it's possible to reproduce images, we tend to forget that the kind of familiarity we have with art is a new phenomenon. For most of human history, the only way you knew what a painting looked like was if you actually saw it in person. And even that is an easier proposition than it once was, since public museums that hold the great works are a relatively recent phenomenon. In our world, it's easy to ignore art precisely because we're bombarded with it, whether we like it or not. Yet it is he who pays the piper who calls the tune. Every man is entitled to his opinion, but unless you're actually a bona fide art consumer your opinion doesn't count for anything.
To be a bona fide art consumer, you have to be the kind of person who is willing to peruse galleries in your area with the intention of dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a painting, not because it will make a good investment, but purely because you like it. The gallery is an essential part of the system. I have a friend who has the rare distinction of being an art history major who actually works in her field. She worked on the staff of the Andy Warhol Museum and owned a gallery in Pittsburgh for a few years before moving to Texas (and managing a gallery there). The gallery is an essential middleman. With art schools graduating thousands every year, and many more than that selling paintings, it's hard for someone looking to buy art who's not fully ensconced within the art world to know where to start. The gallery owner thus acts as an intermediary, able to identify pieces of sufficient value that she can recommend them to customers without hesitation, yet also in touch with economics and the taste of the customer base that she won't alienate them.
It's worth pointing out that there's no barrier to entering the world of an art consumer other than money and the willingness to use it. The whole concept of a gallery opening is to generate buzz that gets people in off the street. They're essentially parties with free booze and light appetizers, and the people throwing them don't care whether you're actually interested in buying anything or have any pull in the art world (though you should dress appropriately and be willing to mingle with the crowd). I tried to attend as many of my friend's openings as I could, and she was always appreciative, as a full house with no buyers is always better than a sparse turnout. Anyway, this is the way the system is. If you're an artist, you try to get noticed by a gallery owner who agrees to display your work and hopefully sell it. If you make enough sales, you'll get a one-man show, have your work displayed in better galleries, get overseas exposure, and eventually reach the rarefied air of having your work sell on Southeby's for tens of thousands of dollars.
There are some artists, though, who can't cut it in this system. Most artists, in fact. Most of them just keep their day jobs and do art on the side and make an occasional sale; nothing wrong with that. But some of them want to get in so desperately that they open their own galleries. These are called "vanity galleries" and are frowned upon. An artist selling his own work through his own gallery is a tacit admission that you're trying to bypass a world where you couldn't make it by buying your way in. From an economic perspective, Thomas Kinkade's work didn't appeal to bona fide art consumers who bought paintings through galleries. It did, however, appeal to the kind of unsophisticated consumer who was willing to pay 40 bucks for a print and didn't even care if the nameplate artist actually did the underlying painting. Kinkade took the vanity gallery to its logical conclusion by opening a chain of stores where you could buy reproductions of his work in between buying jeans and grabbing an Orange Julius.
Buying real art is an intimate act. You attend a gallery opening where you peruse what's available and probably talk to the artist. If you're interested in buying something you call to make an appointment to conduct business during the week. You get an original work that nobody else will have, that the artist put hours into. And you pay a price that demonstrates your appreciation for those efforts. Kinkade reduced it to a commodity that was as disposable as any other. Of course, some respected artists thought that art should be a commodity, most notably Andy Warhol. This would at first seem to absolve Kinkade, but two things need to be taken into consideration. The first is that Warhol only gets respect for this revelation because it was novel at the time. Other pop artists existed before him, but he was the first to take the ball and run with it, while still straddling the line of whether he was serious or not. Some thought his work was criticism of consumer culture; he insisted that he was dead serious that it was not, but his aloof public persona suggested a hint of irony.
Which leads into the second point about Warhol. By the 1980s it was clear that he indeed was serious, and his stature started to fade. The endless screen prints and commissioned portraits of celebrities may have caused his image to soar among the public, but he fell off with critics. Furthermore, a new generation of artists raised on Warhol took his beliefs seriously and began equating garishness with quality. He died unexpectedly after gall bladder surgery in 1987 which was bad for him but good for his image, as he couldn't spend the next twenty years sullying it even further. While the pop art of the 1980s was mass-produced and kitschy, it was at least popular kitsch. Art may be fashion, but fashion is at least contemporary. Kinkade was just as kitschy, but he didn't even try to be cool. He produced art for the kind of people who collect Precious Moments figurines. And as he got older and more famous his strategy became even more crass. If one goes to his website today, the entire first page is licensed work. If his work wasn't kitschy enough already, you can always add a few Disney characters. What makes this especially egregious is that some of the characters, like Moana, didn't exist until after Kinkade's death, further emphasizing the fact that none of his alleged work has anything to do with him personally.
Years ago, before his popular revival, I told my gallery-owning friend that I wanted to write a critical defense of Bob Ross. When I was in high school, art teachers hated Bob Ross, so I thought I was being edgy. She told me that Ross wasn't controversial and that if I really wanted to ruffle some feathers I should defend Thomas Kinkade. I knew little of his work, but, having since looked... I just can't. It's not even good in a technical sense since he obviously doesn't understand color theory. Everything looks garish. There is no sense of proportion. Robert Hughes of Time magazine was highly critical of contemporary art in the wake of Warhol, and he complained that everything seemed designed to make the biggest immediate impact but had no staying power. Kinkade is no exception; his paintings hit you like a dish where you just threw in a dash of every spice in your cupboard. And this is all in pursuit of nothing more than cloying sentimentality. His works don't have anything to say about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At least Norman Rockwell led one to consider the meaning of the American Dream, and Warhol sparked discussion of consumer culture and celebrity. But what does Kinkade do? Are his paintings meditations on false nostalgia? Maybe, but I doubt he would have agreed. Gallery owners recognized the vapidity of his work, so he had no credibility. He had commercial success but it was due more to marketing than craftsmanship. One can argue that millions of people find his work visually appealing, but millions more find pornography visually appealing. I'm not trying to argue that Kinkade isn't art, but I'm not trying to argue that pornography isn't, either.
I'm gonna tl;dr your post down to an analogy: the art world is solely composed of high-class restaurants with Very Serious chefs trying to Make A Statement with their food, and then Thomas Kinkade came along and invented McDonald's.
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To me a lot of this has nothing to do with whether a piece of art is actually good on not. To me, things like craftsmanship, form, balance in colors and shapes. I’m not opposed to “starting conversations” or “having a viewpoint”, but on the other hand it’s not essential to whether a piece has the qualities of good art. If you look at ancient and medieval art, it’s not making odd statements about society, it’s creating something beautiful to tell familiar stories. An icon of a Bible story painted in the year 1000 says nothing more or less than “this is a familiar cultural story.” The art is in the craftsmanship the balance of the characters in the frame, they’re definitely beautiful. The same can be said of ancient Indian images of Shiva dancing, or the Laughing Buddhas, or Japanese prints. The form and the balance of structure and color, the workmanship, the materials, etc. are what make these things beautiful.
Art galleries don’t really care that much about beauty, or quality. A banana duct taped to a wall, a canvas painted in one shade of green, a crucifix in urine, a pile of candy in a corner, etc. these are things that are famous art pieces. But they also are pieces that have no thought behind them, no craftsmanship, no serious effort to produce anything interesting. It’s actually a crass attempt at juvenile humor and quite often is only notable because of its ridiculous nature. Were these artists unknowns, nobody would care about the art. It’s possible it’s sparking a conversation, but how deep of a conversation can one have about a banana taped to a wall, bought by a rich guy with money to burn and who promptly ate the banana? Gee, I hope the banana was tasty, I guess. And I hope the green canvas matches the couch.
Modern visual art has a lot of thought behind it, but it's not the thought about beauty or quality. It's a self-referential thought, the one that interacts with the history and the modern understanding of art. And it's not a novel thing. Suprematism is more than a century old.
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The best and most charitable way of defending Kinkade (or indeed Ross) is that he allowed people to yearn for beauty that he didn’t deliver, but came close enough to to be appealing to people’s base aesthetic sensibilities.
It reminds me of @orthoxerox ‘s suggestion that McMansions look weird because they’re a collection of room that have historic / classical architectural elements like ornate gables and columns and decorative elements draped over them in a garish and jarring way. They lack the symmetricity and sense(s) of scale, proportion and place that the classical architects, aspects of whose styles they copy, had.
The same is true about Kinkade. He is a poor artist, independently of style. His proportions are off, his raw technical ability lacking, his understanding of color nonsensical or zero (pick one). But in his images his customers found something pleasing to their base instincts. Sure, they could buy a print of a romantic landscape made with technical skill, but that wasn’t as easily found and marketed in the mall. Kinkade was there, nobody else was.
It reminds me of architectural critics’ mockery of really ugly and misproportioned attempts at “modern classical” architecture, like Poundbury or a lot of Robert Stern stuff. And sure, most of their criticisms of kitschiness and an absolute lack of understanding of a lot of classical proportionality are valid. But by God, they’re trying. The criticism is, in almost all cases, aimed at the idea rather than the outcome, when what the customer really desires is a better classical (or in the case of Kinkade, idyllic / quasi-realistic / pastoral scenes) product.
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Not only is his art exquisite, but by cutting out the middlemen art galleries, like tesla, he has revolutionized the industry with his efficient way of doing business.
The ‘no staying power’ critique is revealing. It’s up to you if you’re going to keep thinking of a piece of art. When those critics get hit with the raw emotion of a Kincade, they immediately try to forget it.
I’m even more anti-taste than scott, in that I’ve decided that nothing you or anyone else could say is allowed to affect my tastes in any way, because that could reduce my enjoyment of mass-produced accessible art. There’s no upside to discriminating between good and bad art, unlike good and bad science or policy. So I consider this discussion pure edgy cocktail party bullshit without any stakes.
Yeah I have never seen anyone complain about Thomas Kinkade who wasn't being an insufferable snob about it. I get it, I'm snobbish about some things too. But I don't care what the "art community" says: Thomas Kinkade makes better art than most of the rest of them put together, because fuck man at least he understands that people want art to be beautiful. Beauty is subjective and all that, but modern "artists" are so busy sniffing their own farts that they have completely lost touch with what the profession is supposed to be about.
Also while I'm at it: Bob Ross was the greatest visual artist of the 20th century and the fact that we don't have his stuff in a museum instead of literal garbage like bananas duct taped to walls is an utter travesty.
This is just indefensible snobbery.
Obviously I haven't seen every artist's work (who can, there's only so many hours in the day). But I have not seen anyone else whose work I liked more.
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There's a LOT better art being made than Kinkade produced. But the gallerists that Rov Scam refers to generally don't want good art; they want the stuff the common people hate. And people who just want pretty something to put on the wall generally aren't going to go to galleries anyway; they're going to buy a poster print or something equally cheap. Whether that started with galleries carrying only the inaccessible (or worse, ugly-but-fashionable.. there's a LOT of terrible political art, for instance) or people abandoned galleries so the galleries went to more niche stuff, I don't know, but it's true now.
(My wife is an artist, and I have several pieces -- not hers -- we purchased in galleries, so I'm not completely ignorant here.)
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I don't know about this idea of 'storytelling' as far as defining which art is best either, but I do think you need way more context than just some imagined innate sense of 'beautiful colours and patterns' to realise that a Persian rug is nice. The rug also happens:
-to belong to an old tradition
-to be made of natural materials
-to have had care lavished upon it
If you take these aspects away you could end up with something resembling a plastic play mat, with an AI generated pattern printed on it, that was created in five minutes. This would not be nearly as pleasing. You need some sense of wider context to appreciate what is in fact lovely and what is not.
Scott's essay also seemed to miss this, which is why I think he seems to really like imitative architecture and McMansions. In fact he likes them as much or more than the original old architecture they are copying, which is very strange to me.
I don’t think “old tradition” is a requirement. If I’m looking for a rug and I see one like this, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s traditional or brand new in style. It is innately pleasing to the eye. Similarly, it doesn’t matter whether it was made by some amazing machine or by human hands.
Re: “natural materials”, this is because rugs are a multisensory functionable object. Natural fibers are preferred by humans in terms of texture and smell and sound. So, natural fibers simply align with the most beneficial possible experience I can have with a rug. But if this design were placed on a storefront, it would still be beautiful even if the sign were made of plastic. (Though, humans actually enjoy natural materials more, probably for biological reasons, like the mood-enhancing effects of wood phytochemicals)
In a more complicated analysis, every object is socialized: our purchase can benefit another living being, which winds up benefitting ourselves. I think this is why humans usually prioritize “crafted” items. But this is simply part of the object’s experience: provenance is part of the product. And I mean, okay, same with stories…. But telling a story is different from an authentic story.
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