RIP, Thomas Kincade, who will be welcomed into Middlebrow Paradise, where he will be greeted by the Archangel Meh-chael. Serenaded by Muzak, he will stroll through vistas of not-altogether-unpleasant pastoral views, and everyone will be more or less satisfied for all eternity as they walk the streets of Pleather. Finally, he will be welcomed into the presence of a semiomnipotent and liking Gosh.
The man made gazillions being a dick and selling prints of quasi-religious paintings to rubes – crap that Motel 6 wouldn’t hang on their walls. On some level one has to admire his ability to separate fools from their money, though I’d respect him more if I thought he had the same contempt for his fans that he obviously had for art itself – you know, like Jeff Koons.
From the LA Times, in 2006 “A Dark Portrait of the Painter of Light”.
“In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee’s wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman’s breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind. And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.”
Scoff, but his paintings are hanging in 1 out of every 20 homes in the United States.