Postmodern Poster Boy
by Clay Risen

The biggest name in American art has never been mentioned in the pages of Art Forum or Art News. He will never have a retrospective in a major museum. In fact, the vast majority of American artists, art critics and art historians will never even recognize him as one of their own.

His name is Thomas Kinkade, and he is, so he claims, the nation's "most collected living artist." Visit just about any shopping center in the country and you'll see his point — there are hundreds of stores dedicated to selling reprints of his paintings, along with everything from greeting cards to date books to keychains, all bearing images of his work. Kinkade is so popular, in fact, that even manufacturers of items that bear no actual connection to his work — home furnishings, for example — have been clamoring to put his name on their products, simply so that they can be in the "the style and vision of Thomas Kinkade."

Kinkade has millions of fans — his hometown tours have drawn huge crowds — but very few detractors. This is because the art establishment has decided to ignore him, to refuse to recognize his work as art, stopping only occasionally to deride it as kitsch and populist slop; Robert Rosenblum of the Guggenheim told Christianity Today that Kinkade quite simply "doesn't look like an artist who's worth considering," an insult Kinkade easily dismisses as elitist.

But there is a muted quality to even these rare responses, and the art world's lack of acknowledgment reflects less an elitist disdain for Kinkade's populist popularity than a fear of appearing elitist. At a time when NEA funding is once again coming under close scrutiny and Rudy Giuliani is ever more brazen in his demagogic attacks on modern art, the art world has little desire to fan the flames of public resentment. In the past, the fact that it didn't play in Peoria was a badge of high-culture honor. But today, with the majority of the public completely cut off from high culture, the more Karen Finleys there are running around the more likely Jesse Helm's anti-art Holy War is to succeed.

But it goes deeper than merely an issue of survival. The art establishment isn't just refusing to comment on Kinkade's work for fear of public reprisal — in its embrace of postmodern catchall-ism, it has denied itself the right to criticize. In our world devoid of aesthetic standards, steeped in "anything goes," Thomas Kinkade has just as much right to call his work art as anyone else, and he knows it.

Let's get this straight — Kinkade's work is not art. It is a commercial product, made to reflect the desires of consumers. Kinkade is more the product of a corporation's marketing scheme (Media Arts Group, Inc.) than an individual, and his manipulation of spirituality in the name of higher profits is sickening.

Kinkade, of course, would like us to believe that this is just the nature of the beast, that all art is incestuously bound to marketing, that there's no difference between his work and, say, pop art. But pop art was less about making money than about making fun of making money, of making art into a mass-produced commodity. Warhol's studio was called "The Factory" and his project was always about giving the lie to mass production; consider his eerie stacks of Brillo Pad boxes or his lithograph Elvises.

Kinkade, however, is also not very subtle about his dreams of turning paint into gold, of making his art into a cash cow. He told USA Today that "I'm very excited about allowing myself to become mainstream in the sense that people would have the same enjoyment of me that they do of a Walt Disney movie or a Garth Brooks piece of music," and he notes that the large amount of wall space in the average American home is, for him, "a big opportunity."

He would add, of course, that his monetary success has nothing to do with the artistic merit of his work, and he points to artists throughout history who made money off of their talents. But the fact that art is usually compensated, and often commissioned, does little to justify Kinkade's assembly-line aesthetic. If a work is commissioned for a specific purpose, it is still conceived of as a singular expression and is, ultimately, wholly the product of the artist's creativity. Kinkade's work, on the other hand, is the result of marketing practices. In its focus on works for immediate reproduction and mass consumption, combined with MAGI's art-as-business rhetoric like "lifestyle branding" and "art for every price point," Kinkade's work gives up its right to a berth in the same category as Caravaggio's or Rembrandt's (two artists, by the way, whom Kinkade declares an aesthetic bond with).

But Kinkade actually has more in common with his contemporaries in the art establishment than with the Old Masters. This is because in the end, Kinkade's claim as an artist can only be recognized in an aesthetic context where literally anything can be considered art, a context that pretty much defines today's art world.

Postmodern art has declared that "anything goes," from Damien Hirst's pickled sheep to Tracey Emin's bed to things even more ridiculous. But this declaration has been made with the tacit understanding that "anything" needs to be shocking, to test the limits of art in the most disturbing way possible. So when Kinkade shows up and says, "Hi, I have something that will test the limits of art, too, except that instead of being gross and oversized and not the kind of thing you would ever want to display in your living room, my stuff is going to be warm and fuzzy and 'Christian,' but also mass-produced and market-tested," the Hirsts and Emins of the world are thrown for a loop.

So, unable to respond, the art establishment ignores Kinkade, hoping he will go away. But, of course, he won't; his sales are up every year, and he now has plans for a Thomas Kinkade Museum, in which "real" artists like Norman Rockwell and, not surprisingly, himself, will be displayed. And all the while, Kinkade is gaining lots of ground by using the art establishment's weapons against it — who are they to say what is art?

The blame, of course, doesn't lie completely with the current art establishment; rebellion against institutionalized notions of what is and isn't art has long been the default vehicle for one art movement to rise up against the old order. It is just that with Kinkade, we are suddenly seeing that this strategy can go the other way, as well. That the expansion of what is and isn't art is not always a good thing, and it can be used to expand corporate profits as easily as it can be used to expand the limits of expression. That postmodernism, for all its pretentions about the truth of denying Truth, really was throwing the baby out with the bath water, after all.

Now, if only someone would stand up and say this.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.