Whackjob of Light

Whackjob of Light
April 10, 2012 by Kevin T. Keith

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Aside from just having unforgivably sleazy taste and goals as an artist, though, he plumbed the depths of schlock in truly original ways. Obviously, nobody can sell 10 million paintings. You can sell 10 million prints, but then it’s hard to call each of them an “original”. What Kinkade did was create prints of his horrid paintings and then have hired workers – “master highlighters” – daub white paint on them in a few spots each to increase the eyeball-searing light effects and allow him to sell them as “hand-painted”. He also created his own franchised chain of (for want of a better term) art galleries selling only his stuff, and marketed an increasing range of knockoff “art products”, featuring reproductions of his paintings on coffee mugs, glow-in-the-dark nightlights, posters, and in a huge range of differing frames, print sizes, textures, and reproduction media. Eventually he started selling his endorsement for traditional-styled furniture, Christian-themed straight-to-DVD movies, and a line of ghostwritten Christian-style romance novels set in quaint little villages filled with cottages and rose gardens, which get uniformly awful reviews. He even endorsed at least two “planned communities” (tract developments) that supposedly reflect the architectural themes in his paintings and are marketed using his name.

But all was not well in fake-nostalgic treacly kitsch paradise. For reasons not explained, his marketing machine went bankrupt not long ago, and he wound up in bitter legal disputes with his distribution chain, in which – shockingly – he was charged with fraudulently playing on his victims’ collectors’ Christian sentiments to get them to buy his crap. Hard to believe, I know. Eventually, it led to this:

Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of “natural causes.” This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman’s breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, “This one’s for you, Walt!”

Kinkade’s explanation: “there may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don’t recall”. OK then.

http://leanleft.com/2012/04/10/whackjob-of-light/