Sam
TS Member
There's a new park that's been announced in America called DreamVision. It won't actually get built for the reasons outlined in this excellent post, which I can't be bothered to go into - but something else caught my eye reading some of the news reports about the proposals.
By coincidence, I had heard of Thomas Kinkade for the first time in my life the day before news of DreamVision came out. He was mentioned in passing in a book about contemporary art by Grayson Perry, called Playing to the Gallery. Perry is talking about how taste is formed, and how experiments have been conducted to see if repeated exposure to a style of art will make us prefer that style or if there is some innate sense of 'good art' and 'bad art' which means that people will always naturally gravitate towards good art even if they have been exposed more to bad art.
In terms of modern art I am an enthusiastic layman, nowhere close to an expert, but still I was surprised that I had never heard of someone who Perry describes as 'hyper-popular'. When I think of hyper-popular I think of Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami - artists who produce work inspired by pop culture but who are also critically acclaimed and are, for want of a better term, 'serious artists'. I looked into Kinkade and was amazed that I had never heard of him before, given his stratospheric popularity and the utter critical drubbing that he has received for decades. The Washington Post estimates that one in twenty American homes has a print of one of his works. If you've never seen his stuff before, it's quite shocking, but not in the way that a sheep cut in half by Hirst is shocking or in the way that Piss Christ is shocking. What almost makes your eyes pop-out is, despite a high degree of technical skill, how absolutely bloody awful and horrible his work is. Yet you can't stop looking at it, you can't stop scrolling through his website, each image seemingly more sickening than the last:
They're like a shot of some super sweet drug directly into the eyeballs. They almost make you reel with how tacky and kitsch and dated they are. At the same time they are intriguing - sometimes something can be so awful that it is morbidly fascinating, like watching footage of a car crash. Here's some more (if you can stomach it)...
These works are so hard to define. They don't really resemble any art that has been made for the last hundred years, and they don't have anything close to the subtlety that Turner's work has (Kinkade compares himself to Turner by adopting his nickname of 'the painter of light'). So what do they actually look like? They could be images from a postcard that you might find in a small-town America general store. They could be pictures hung in hospitals - the kind of blandly non-offensive art favoured for obvious reasons in places where vulnerable people are likely to be. But more than either of those, to me they bring to mind... theme park concept art. Concept art without the rides, but look at that bottom picture in the snow... the guests are there, and presented in the same idyllic, weirdly inhuman and unnatural way that people are arranged in real concept art produced by Disney, EP or Toverland.
Kinkade also compares himself to Walt Disney, and inevitable the Disney company hired him to immortalise some of their theme parks and films on canvas.
That last one could easily be concept art for New Fantasyland. If you want to see more of this stuff by the way - and there is loads more of it - type in 'Kinkade Disney' into Google Images. So in a way, three years after his death (would you believe from these paintings that he was an alcoholic adulterer?) Kinkade has come full circle. His work has probably been the direct inspiration behind the development of theme park concept art, and now a theme park is announced based directly on his work. It won't be built, of course, but I find that a fascinating idea, the way that someone can inadvertently inspire a genre and then have that genre inspire them (or at least, his posthumous 'Thomas Kinkade Partners' company).
During Kinkade's lifetime, schemes vaguely similar to this theme park were mooted. His style is ideal for transplantation into other mediums. You could never build a hotel based on the works of Mark Rothko, or a leisure centre that evoked Jackson Pollock, but you can try and pipe Kinkade's essence into a real built environment. In 2001 a housing company announced that they would build a village based upon his work. But, unsurprisingly, it didn't look anything like the idyllic, hallucinogenic images above by the time it was done...
I have spent hours and hours looking at his work and reading about him over the past few days, since he was mentioned by Perry. Art that I find appalling is, arguably, more interesting to me than art that I find beautiful. Like looking at picture of animals with two-head deformities on the internet, I want to look away but something is engrossingly compelling about what he does. Could a theme park based on his work ever really come to fruition? No park could recreate the unnatural, ethereal light that seeps into all of his paintings. Would it get close to being as sickly sweet, as nauseating but also as addictive and controversial as the originals? I think it's unlikely that we will ever know, but it's interesting to think about the Venn diagram between fine art and concept art (maybe game art as well). Before I read Perry's book, I didn't know those circles overlapped anywhere..
BusinessWire said:
By coincidence, I had heard of Thomas Kinkade for the first time in my life the day before news of DreamVision came out. He was mentioned in passing in a book about contemporary art by Grayson Perry, called Playing to the Gallery. Perry is talking about how taste is formed, and how experiments have been conducted to see if repeated exposure to a style of art will make us prefer that style or if there is some innate sense of 'good art' and 'bad art' which means that people will always naturally gravitate towards good art even if they have been exposed more to bad art.
In terms of modern art I am an enthusiastic layman, nowhere close to an expert, but still I was surprised that I had never heard of someone who Perry describes as 'hyper-popular'. When I think of hyper-popular I think of Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami - artists who produce work inspired by pop culture but who are also critically acclaimed and are, for want of a better term, 'serious artists'. I looked into Kinkade and was amazed that I had never heard of him before, given his stratospheric popularity and the utter critical drubbing that he has received for decades. The Washington Post estimates that one in twenty American homes has a print of one of his works. If you've never seen his stuff before, it's quite shocking, but not in the way that a sheep cut in half by Hirst is shocking or in the way that Piss Christ is shocking. What almost makes your eyes pop-out is, despite a high degree of technical skill, how absolutely bloody awful and horrible his work is. Yet you can't stop looking at it, you can't stop scrolling through his website, each image seemingly more sickening than the last:
They're like a shot of some super sweet drug directly into the eyeballs. They almost make you reel with how tacky and kitsch and dated they are. At the same time they are intriguing - sometimes something can be so awful that it is morbidly fascinating, like watching footage of a car crash. Here's some more (if you can stomach it)...
These works are so hard to define. They don't really resemble any art that has been made for the last hundred years, and they don't have anything close to the subtlety that Turner's work has (Kinkade compares himself to Turner by adopting his nickname of 'the painter of light'). So what do they actually look like? They could be images from a postcard that you might find in a small-town America general store. They could be pictures hung in hospitals - the kind of blandly non-offensive art favoured for obvious reasons in places where vulnerable people are likely to be. But more than either of those, to me they bring to mind... theme park concept art. Concept art without the rides, but look at that bottom picture in the snow... the guests are there, and presented in the same idyllic, weirdly inhuman and unnatural way that people are arranged in real concept art produced by Disney, EP or Toverland.
Kinkade also compares himself to Walt Disney, and inevitable the Disney company hired him to immortalise some of their theme parks and films on canvas.
That last one could easily be concept art for New Fantasyland. If you want to see more of this stuff by the way - and there is loads more of it - type in 'Kinkade Disney' into Google Images. So in a way, three years after his death (would you believe from these paintings that he was an alcoholic adulterer?) Kinkade has come full circle. His work has probably been the direct inspiration behind the development of theme park concept art, and now a theme park is announced based directly on his work. It won't be built, of course, but I find that a fascinating idea, the way that someone can inadvertently inspire a genre and then have that genre inspire them (or at least, his posthumous 'Thomas Kinkade Partners' company).
During Kinkade's lifetime, schemes vaguely similar to this theme park were mooted. His style is ideal for transplantation into other mediums. You could never build a hotel based on the works of Mark Rothko, or a leisure centre that evoked Jackson Pollock, but you can try and pipe Kinkade's essence into a real built environment. In 2001 a housing company announced that they would build a village based upon his work. But, unsurprisingly, it didn't look anything like the idyllic, hallucinogenic images above by the time it was done...
I have spent hours and hours looking at his work and reading about him over the past few days, since he was mentioned by Perry. Art that I find appalling is, arguably, more interesting to me than art that I find beautiful. Like looking at picture of animals with two-head deformities on the internet, I want to look away but something is engrossingly compelling about what he does. Could a theme park based on his work ever really come to fruition? No park could recreate the unnatural, ethereal light that seeps into all of his paintings. Would it get close to being as sickly sweet, as nauseating but also as addictive and controversial as the originals? I think it's unlikely that we will ever know, but it's interesting to think about the Venn diagram between fine art and concept art (maybe game art as well). Before I read Perry's book, I didn't know those circles overlapped anywhere..