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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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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.

Bob Ross was the greatest visual artist of the 20th century

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.

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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