The gist: “In its February 2006 decision, the arbitration panel said Kinkade and other company officials used terms like “partner,” “trust,” “Christian” and “God” to create “a certain religious environment designed to instill a special relationship of trust” with the couple. What the company didn’t tell them, said their attorney, was that they would have to sell Kinkade’s works at minimum retail prices while the artist undercut them with discount sales, some of which he made himself on cable television. It was part of a plan, they claimed, to lower the value of the publicly traded company before Kinkade bought it in 2004, at steep losses to many investors. Hazlewood and Spinello put their $122,000 savings into galleries in Charlottesville and Fredericksburg, Va., that opened in 1999 and 2000 and closed in 2003.”
The more colorful AVClub piece about this includes some fun stuff from an earlier article about Kinkade:
[I]“I think it was Roy or Siegfried or whatever had a codpiece in his leotards,” Dandois testified. “And so when the show started, Thom [Kinkade] just started yelling, ‘Codpiece, codpiece,’ and had to be quieted by his mother and Nanette.”
[/I]So I hope the next time you see one of his godawful paintings you join me in thinking about codpieces.
The Tacoma Mall nearby had a Thomas Kinkade store up until last year. The most hideous paintings would be displayed in their windows all the time. I could never figure out who was buying that crap. I didn’t know about the Christian tie-in. That’s some pretty savvy marketing.
Haha, he grew up in the same small town I grew up in. Some of his famous pieces are from around town. I had the (dis)pleasure of hearing him speak a few times at our schools while growing up. Arrogant bastard.
I really want someone else from Placerville to make it big, so we can stop showing off this assclown as the best thing the town has produced.
If he had merely been a hugely popular bad artist and not the con-man the OP’s article makes him out to be, I’d really have no problem with him.
If you’re a professional, a commercial artist, you make money doing your job. Part of that job is obviously self-promotion. If I could sell a syrupy worthless piece for $50k for a few days’ worth of work, I might well mess around with more serious work in my spare time, but I’d for sure be selling trashy prints for all the market would bear. There’s no reason to despise some guy who happens to become wealthy and famous selling trash. It’s the popular taste, after all; it’s not like he forced the art down the throats of someone buying numbered print 12543 out of 100000 at the local mall “art store”. It’s not like anyone who bought a Kinkade would have wound up with a Rothko instead if only it had been available. I doubt any starving artists were hurt.
Anyway, who knows, like Dumas or Dickens or Toulouse-Lautrec, maybe in a hundred years the kind of people who at the time said their work was trash will think Kinkade is classic too. OK, OK, I grant it’s unlikely…
