According to that definition, I'm a kitsch aficionado. I like TV game
shows, for instance, and Howard Stern. I like Burger King double Whoppers
with cheese, and Las Vegas. I like Led Zeppelin songs.
But then there's kitsch as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it.
"Sentimentality or... pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts."
This is where kitsch gets more problematic.
Sure, every September I try to watch both the Jerry Lewis Telethon and
the Miss America pageant.
Both of those certainly qualify as kitsch -- sentimental, pretentious,
bad taste -- but they don't pretend to be "the arts."
It's when kitsch tries to pass as serious art that I find it impossible
to enjoy or laugh off.
Like Thomas Kinkade.
Lately, I've developed something of an obsession with Thomas Kinkade.
Thomas Kinkade is a painter, an artist.
A very successful, very bad artist.
You may have seen his art at one of the hundreds of Thomas Kinkade galleries
in shopping malls around the country. There are no fewer than three Kinkade
galleries, for instance, just in the Omaha neighborhood where I grew up.
His pictures are pretty much all the same -- overripe American landscapes
and cozy old-fashioned American houses all bathed in golden pre-dusk light.
They are all glimpses of the same Reaganite Christian never-never-land,
depicted in the same way over and over again.
They make Norman Rockwell look like a hard-edged avant-gardist. There
have never been more treacly pictures of inanimate objects. And they're
not even very well-painted.
But every year Kinkade sells more than a hundred million dollars worth
of this stuff.
Some of his customers have their reproductions customized by one of Kinkade's
itinerant "master highlighters." The highlighters brush on a
few strokes of real paint, thus transforming an overpriced mass-produced
print into, quote, "a unique work of art."
Kinkade's corporate blurbs call him "America's foremost living artist"
and
"the most commercially successful and collected living artist in
U.S. history."
But what really makes him appalling is how he pitches himself as a kind
of religious prophet.
Kinkade's corporate web site says the business is all about "his
message of peace, hope, the beauty of nature and a simpler way of life."
Spreading that message of a simpler way of life is why he recently licensed
his name to a gated development of $400,000 houses outside San Francisco
-- The Village at Hiddenbrooke, A Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™
Community.
And why last month he published a novel, written "with" a co-author,
called Cape Light -- most emphatically not to be confused with the photographer
Joel Myerowitz's magnificent book of the same name.
Like his paintings, Thomas Kinkade's novel makes my teeth hurt.
Imagine a book for slow 12-year-olds written by the Simpsons' goody-goody
fundamentalist neighbor Ned Flanders.
It's that bad.
As the critic Laura Miller of Salon.com said in her review, "Cape
Light has the blandness of foods prepared for invalids whose stomachs
can't tolerate too much excitement or variety."
Painting, real estate, now fiction: where will it all end?
Maybe starting here and now.
Cape Light is a bomb, if its Amazon.com sales rank is any indication.
A low, low 13,760 as of last Friday. And Kinkade's company, the Media
Arts Group, seems to be tanking too -- last year its revenues dropped
by 20 percent, and it is now unprofitable.
For me, those are messages of hope.
This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.
About Kurt Andersen