Well, to be honest, there's no good punchline to that joke. While it's clear that Boehner and Kinkade are not averse to long evenings bending their elbows, I suspect that neither the rarefied clubs in which they prefer to tipple, nor the 'right'-minded denizens of said clubs, would have embraced Benjamin, a Cultural Marxist associated with the Frankfurt School, with rousing cheers of 'Walt!'
These three—Benjamin, Kinkade, Boehner—are nevertheless related in my mind as I've been pondering recenty the nature of right-wing aesthetics, the pernicious rôle it plays in contemporary political discourse in America as well as the stultifying rôle is plays in the consumption of media, both corporate and quasi-artistic.
Warning: if you are a fan of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of LightTM you had best move along. You're not going to like what follows after the thingama-squiggly-doodad...
Walter Benjamin wrote what many, including myself, consider one of the definitive critical statements on right-wing / fascist aesthetics in his 1935 essay entitled 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (essay). In brief, Benjamin was concerned in this essay to document the manner in which technological innovations, specifically photography and film, had 1) altered the conventional relationship between viewer and art, from direct and engaged contemplation to indirect and distracted consumption, 2) cast aside conventional notions of artistic authenticity, thereby further alienating the viewer from any personal contact with the image or its creator and 3) facilitated the introduction of right-wing aesthetics—superficial representations of power as distinct from profound intimations of knowledge—into the political life of European nations’ citizenry whose orientation to emergent mass-media had been redefined as that of a narcissistic voyeur.
Of course, I do a grave disservice to the complexity (and contradictions) of Benjamin’s thought in this seminal essay by attempting to summarize in a few terse statements a critique deserving of many more dissertation-length treatments. Yet these few key points are the foundation upon which Benjamin, in his Epilogue, presciently warned of the threat of this emergent right-wing aesthetics in the context of 1930s European fascism:
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.
Benjamin did not live to witness the emergence and dominance of right-wing and right-leaning corporate media in our day; he took his own life on 26 September 1940 in the Hotel de Francia in Portbou, on the border between France and Spain, when it became evident that his attempt to evade French and Nazi authorities had failed. He would, I think, have nevertheless immediately recognized their kind, their motivations and the narcissistic voyeurism of their distracted and deluded consumers.
Benjamin's essay, particularly his juxtaposition of painting versus photography and film, has been read by some critics as an élitist condemnation of populist art forms. I strenuously disagree with this view, and suggest that the means of technical reproduction of some ‘high’ media—painting, sculpture et cetera—were simply not advanced enough in Benjamin’s day to grab his attention in the same way as photography and film. Again, had Benjamin lived in our day I believe that he would have recognized the potential social harm inherent to the mass-production and commodification of other traditional media such as painting to embody right-wing aesthetics for an uncritical and dislocated reactionary audience.
FAIR WARNING: here begins a rant against Thomas Kinkade, Painter of LightTM. If you’re a fan, nothing more to see here, move along...
I’ll be honest... I hate Thomas Kinkade’s work, and I will not sully the term ‘art’ by applying it to his treacly output in the style of what has been called, with all irony intended, Republican Realism. The more I learn about Kinkade the person and Kinkade the businessman, the more I have come to view everything about him with disgust. And it’s not just Kinkade, though he’s the most obvious example. Have a gander if you dare at the corpus of work by Judith Pond Kudlow (yes, wife of Larry) and see yet another face of Republican Realism characterized by such a complete rejection of modernity that one would be justified in describing it as an absolute rejection of reality. Given, though, that Kinkade is the most public and most reproduced of the Republican Realists, I shall direct Benjamin’s attention to his...er...handiwork.
Kinkade’s mission statement from his website is worth noting in full, as it successfully encodes the agenda of Republican Realism:
My mission as an artist is to capture those special moments in life adorned with beauty and light. I work to create images that project a serene simplicity that can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone. That’s what I mean by sharing the light.
Shorter Kinkade:
FIAT LUX (Genesis 1:3).
Kinkade’s work, if I were pressed to describe it in a single phrase, reveals a spiritually-suffused wistfulness rooted in Romantic Nationalism for an idealized monocultural America. Consider his bucolic landscapes in which typically no figures intervene. These appeal to the spirit of American frontierism, to Manifest Destiny and to an antiquated and dangerously naïve form of nationalism. Or consider his cityscapes and architectural pieces, especialy churches, most of which treat nostalgically of a ‘Mayberry’ vision of America, prior to the Civil Rights Movement; figures in these scenes, when they are recognizable, are almost exclusively white. Or consider his dedication to Christmas-themed vignettes, affirmation of a vision of an ‘enlightened’ Christian nation so constant that even Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, wearing his sad sweater, might blush.
There is no multiculturalism in Kinkade’s Romantic Nationalism; there is but a reactionary nostalgia for a white, Christian ‘heroic’ America unencumbered by the reality of our national history. His work is undoubtedly the appropriate wall-decoration for the modern gated community.
Kinkade’s mass-produced work is wholly at home within the broader right-wing aesthetics of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, invoking the essential messages of our contemporary GOP/TPers in a convenient frame (pun absolutely intended.) Benjamin would no doubt recognize that the denial of reality so characteristic of Republican Realism (Kinkade and others) is indeed analogous to the dislocation and self-alienation so successfully manipulated by European fascists in the 1930s.
What then of Speaker John Boehner, the third member of our imaginary boys’ night out? Boehner is the perfectly telegenic empty suit / unexposed negative / blank canvas onto which the imagery and invocations of the right can be projected. He is not substantive, but merely a simulacrum whose words and deeds echo the destructive will of the right. He is that white, male figure smiling contentedly in any of Kinkade’s works. He is the uncritical consumer of Republican Realism. He is the narcissistic voyeur. He is, above all, the manifestation of fascist thought of which Benjamin warned would experience our collective destruction ‘as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.’
Destroy the nation ostensibly to save the nation, and smile amidst the ruin...