I love the part in the OP where the damages are $860,000 and the attorney/litigation bill is $1.2 million.
OK - so what was the fraud here? These people invested in galleries and were required to sell the Kincaide pieces they carried at a level set by the company… Kincaide sold some paintings on TV for discount prices. Obviously when they signed the contract they knew the conditions for selling those pieces, in terms of a minimum price, just as a number of companies will tell some retailers they are not allowed to sell below a certain price point.
So the fraud is Kincaide selling some of his paintings on TV for discount prices? Aren’t there various companies that require companies to sell at or above certain price points but then allow other channels to market that are lower?
Betty Crocker’s not real?
I’m sure there’s a simple element of “not speaking ill of the dead” at work, but it is interesting to see how gentle / borderline euphemistic various major organs “that know better” are being about the elephant in the room - that if any art is horrid, banal, self-parodically bad, it’s Kinkade’s.
The above picture is on sale on his website from, depending on size, 1,000-11,000 dollars. I like to pretend to myself that anyone - even someone who detests all “modern art,” the most strict, traditional figurist could still somehow understand how dreadful this is.
The gold standard for “bad art” used to be, at one time, over-ripe bombastic photorealistic 19th century historical canvasses. But compared to Kinkade? Good grief, give me the art of 19th century tacky German bourgoises.
The appeal is the amount of detail in the painting. It’s already a pastiche of saccharine Hallmark values, so that part’s not worth doting on.
If you want to get psychological it does reflect - and honestly, i think it’s worth understanding - the fears of conservative Americans. Thomas Kinkade paintings are like a pep rally in front of a stadium church where they take you by the hand in front of the crowd, and say, “Here is a man! One of our men!” Conservatives want to be reassured that they are part of a group, and that that group is still going strong. Liberals - and i’m generalizing to the point of imbecility here - want to tear these groups that they are a part of down. These paintings are memories or fantasies of solid land for unsteady nerves of those on a ship adrift.
If you are going to position yourself as the painter of light(the Divine), a Christian, a God fearing man, etc…yeah you’re kind of going to paint yourself into a corner, so to speak. You’ll make bank though since the majority of the country(at this time) is your potential market and who else is painting for them?
It’s why I watch The Walking Dead, who else is providing a zombie tv show for me to watch?
Kincaid’s attraction to the masses was simple - scenes from life as they knew it. Much like earlier popular artists did the same thing, like Rockwell. I’m not saying that Kincaid was anywhere near as good as Rockwell, but its the same general approach.
My parents ran a gallery for a time when I was growing up. Trying to understand what will sell and what won’t is a Vegas-esque crapshoot. For example, one of the prints they constantly had to reorder was a guy flashing some woman. You just never know what people are going to think is worth putting on the wall in their house.
You owe us a JPEG.
It was a version of this photograph/image:
I can’t believe that no one has said this.
Most of all, Tom.
…
“…motel art.”
Looking at that Indy painting, I’d say it’s “scenes from life as they imagined it”. Which, admittedly, amounts to the same thing.
Albeit the image is rather low quality, are there any hideously obese people in there? If not then I think it’s fair to say realism went out the window.
Edit:reading is hard
Didn’t see a single hideously obese person last time I was at the Long Beach Grand Prix. Maybe they are fatter in Indiana. Now, the thing I was wondering about was the straw hat. Who the hell wears those?
Oh, and speaking of the LBGP, that’s this weekend! Hopefully Kinky didn’t ever paint that…
That straw boating hat was the first thing I noticed too.
I used to love kitsch but this work is beyond that.
Interesting bit of trivia about the flasher in that photo, Mr. Bud Clark: years later he was voted Mayor of Portland for two terms.
That’s actually quite clever.
If you listen to his audio commentary for the painting, it’s supposed to commemorate the centennial of the Indy 500, with cars from both the classic and modern era.
Presumably, the dude in the hat is one of the fans from the dawn of auto racing.
Ya know, I look at his stuff, and go “eh” but a lot of people liked it. At the same time, when my wife and I were younger and started collecting art (small prints and a couple of oils, we weren’t rich but we didn’t have kids back then) and got to know the owner of a couple of high end galleries in Houston, I was also pretty “eh” about quite a few modern artists that all the high end society folks oohed and ahhed over at the showings. I studied art some in college, then when we started picking up pieces I did a ton of studying and going to the galleries and museums, etc.
I’m not sure that a Kinkade of the Indy 500 is all that more worth laughing at than a 4 inch pencil diagonal line across a large white canvas that went for $13,500.
At our house, we only refer to him as the “Painter of Shite,”
Several years ago I was at a cocktail party, and the “what would you grab if the house was on fire” conversation got started. The hostess said, “Well, once I knew the kids and the animals were safe, I would grab the Kinkade.” Yes, she actually prefaced it with a definite article, as if it were some rare & famous work. She then gestured towards a fireplace in the next room that was visible through a passageway, and sure enough there was a large Kinkade painting hanging over it. At least a 48" canvas, maybe larger. She went on to describe how it was signed by Kinkade, highlighted by him, and several other ways it was apparently collectible and desirable. I couldn’t have been the only one that wanted to burst out laughing, but we all managed to keep straight faces and make appreciative noises until someone else piped up and moved the conversation along.