Thomas Kinkade is a specifically American story.
Small town California, so marketed. Evangelical values, so marketed...
But then there's this LA Times article.
Now, it's not just that speaking as an accomplished artist myself, that I find the entire idea of Kinkade's lack of authenticity to be offensive... "painter of light" indeed. Please.
It's more that I find the man's Warhol immitation to be so absurd and blatantly phony and that I'm struck by how archetypal of American Evangelical Christianity (and therefore shallow) he is...
how much like Bush, like Enron the guy is. Total scumbag. And what does that say about the culture that bought into him... just like they bought into Bush.
What does that say about our rural smalltown American culture?
Says a lot in my view. And none of it at all good.
Here's some clips.
Basically. My thesis is this.
Kinkade and the culture that supports him... same thing as Bush. Same thing as Enron.
Crooks masquerading as religious men... fool the masses of totally ignorant and self-absorbed Christians... and make millions.
And the Christians never learn. Story as old as time.
A devout Christian who calls himself the "Painter of Light," Kinkade trades heavily on his beliefs and says God has guided his brush -- and his life -- for the last 20 years.
"When I got saved, God became my art agent," he said in a 2004 video biography
...
It's not just Kinkade's business practices that have been called into question. Former gallery owners, ex-employees and others say his personal behavior also belies the wholesome image on which he's built his empire.
In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.
And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.
"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.
...
But a far more selfish portrait of the artist emerges from legal action brought by former gallery owners against Kinkade, Media Arts Group Inc. -- the public company he has since taken private -- and some who helped build it into a $250-million-a-year retail juggernaut before its sales flagged and its stock tanked.
Ex-dealers allege that the artist used his faith -- and manipulated theirs -- to induce them to invest in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries, independently owned stores licensed to deal exclusively in his work. They also contend he sought to devalue the company before buying it back two years ago for $32.7 million, renaming it Thomas Kinkade Co.
America's "heartland" is a joke. The culture that votes for Bush is the culture that worships this dogshit on a canvas.
Pathetic.