(no subject)

[daphnep]

Over breakfast, Dan asked "do you think Thomas Kinkade's work will ever be in a real museum?"

"I hope so," I replied. "In fact, I'd like to curate that show, myself."

I told him what angle I'd like to take, and what context, and we mulled over speculative titles. I can already see the street-side banners:

Happy Little Trees: Duchamp to Kinkade, Consumerism and the Commodification of Fine Art in the 20th Century.
Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Bob Ross, Thomas Kinkade





I think it's genius.
The key component of art, to me (and I mean art that makes a mark in history) is that it tells us something essential about the time and place in which it was made. And I think Kinkade's work makes two valuable points about our era: the shopping mall consumer culture of mass manufacturing, and America's current deep need for fantasy and nostalgia for idyllic times and places that never existed. It's not a flattering portrayal, perhaps, but it's completely relevant.

I'd also like to work into this lineup some aspect of the spiritual/devotional purpose of his art. Art has long served that purpose, commonly and throughout cultures. We no longer find the same comfort in gazing into the eyes of the Blessed Mary Mother of God, but clearly glowing cottages with picket-fenced gardens somehow, for many, serve the same purpose, today.

I just can't figure out who Kinkade's closest (20th C) predecessor would be for devotional painting of this type--I need another artist or two on the contemporary spiritual side to add to my exhibition, to make this link.

Comments

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Look at the date of his civil rights pictures--well after the start of the civil rights movement. These pictures make it clear that he saw racism as an evil, while at the same time he was content to depict the all white fantasy world demanded by publishers during the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and early 1940s.
Here are two further points of comparison. The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein worked under the same constraints yet he rebelled against them to the extent he could--usually at the end of one his juvenile novels he would off-handedly mention how much darker one character's skin was than another, or that the character turned out to have a Hispanic last name. He even managed to get published a novel in which the US was taken over by people like Santorum who had to be deposed through a revolution led by racial minorities (which he made acceptable by covering it over with a thick blanket of ps.-science). I don't see a similar effort from Rockwell.

Another point to consider is the slogan of the Fascist party; 'God, Nation, Family." Rockwell has an uncomfortable convergence with this ideology that is not reflected in contemporary art movements such as Surrealism. It espouses an uncritical acceptance of the status quo. For comparison here is a link to painting by a contemporary of Rockwell with a background in rural rural Minnesota. The date is 1939:

http://plattfineart.com/artist.php?id=189&artid=1180&left=2&cat=

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

With all due respect, I think that holding up Arnold Blanch as the true or predominant artistic voice of the culture and era, leaving Rockwell as a holdout, stretches it pretty far.