ART FOR EVERYBODY (Miranda Yousef 2023)
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MIRANDA YOUSEF: ART FOR EVERYBODY (2023)
The most profitable art in the world is terrible art
Very bad art is the most pervasive (though arguably it is not really art at all). Luckily we do not have to look at it. It is found primarily in the houses of naive and tasteless people, who adore it. There are things that are off about this documentary film, starting with the title. Art, apparently, is not for everybody, and that is where the film first goes wrong. Art requires taste and culture, and not everyone possesses these things. The market in sophsticated art - like Basquiat - is booming now. One of his paihtings famously sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby's in 2017 - but overall that market can't match the profitability of the junk described in a new documentary entitled Art for Everybody, about the super-successful kitsch artist Thomas Kincade.
Kinkade's landscapes made him the most collected and despised painter ever. After his shocking death, his family discovered a vault of unseen paintings that supposedly reveal a more complex artist whose life and work embody our divided America. This is the teaser pretext for this little documentary, which is as kitsch and naive in its way as the "art" it exposes.
The first shocking and depressing news this film provides is that Thomas Kincade is the biggest-selling "artist" of all time, by far. His work has no originality whatsoever. This is a cunning and dishonest artist who chose early on to go for what sold to the most numerous and naive "art" collectors, people who have no concept of "art" but want to buy pictures to go on their walls. Kincade committed to putting his talent at representation, brushwork, and painting to work serving the lowest commmon denominator, staying within the narrow, sentimental margins of what appeals to those who are naive and have no taste.
He worked early on in Hollywood painting backgrounds for the 1983 Ralph Bakshi animated film, Fire and Ice. Bakshi , for this film, speaks in admiration and approval of Kincade and comments on how fast he worked. (Obvously Bakshi hates conemporary art, and like others who hate it, holds up kitsch art as preferable.) Perhaps Kincade thought of working for Disney, but this is not mentioned. A family man, he married and had four daughters, who, with his widow, are talking heads here. He got the idea of doing "editions." Essentially they are reproductions he sold of his paintings with factory- or showroom-added artisanal "touches" (dealers, I find, like to call them "embellishments") to make them seem, to the naive buyers, like originals.
This documentary is almost as naive as the customers for these kitsch "paintings," which, though the film never explains, were often printed on canvas that was then stretched around a frame to make it seem like an original painting. The film lets those in the Kincade business call these "editions," but they are not legitimate artistic "editions." They are merely expensive reproductions, sold by the artist's company along with ersatz guarantees of "authenticity" to a clientele that doesn't really know the difference between a painting and a print. (The film needed to clarify the Kincade business's deceptions and the ignorance it exploits much more than it does.)
Since Kincade's wanted to sell lots of "art," he produced a great variety within his heartwarming (landscape) subjects, winter, summer, spring, autumn, mountains, valleys, lighthouses, cottages, and so on, to give his customers a wide choice. He devised a slogan, "painter of light," easy to grasp. A talking head explains this refers to the houses and "cottages" he paints, which are glowing with cheery light from inside, to make them seem warm and cozy. We see footage of him painting in the Cotswolds in England, which is famous for its cozy cottages, but making paintings that deliberately depart from what he sees to fit his fantasies.
Blake Gopnik, an art writer for the NY Times, reminds us that the phrase "painter of light" was first used for the great 19th-century English painter J.M.W.Turner. But Turner's use of light was truly original, and Kincade's, not. Kincade's use of light is saccharine and sentimental. This sickly sweet "warmth" is most often seen in certain saccharine animated Christmas cards today, and of course Kincade got his images printed on greeting cards and calendars and other saleable things.
Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, points out the "light" inside these "cottages" is so bright, they would have to be blazing with fire inside. Indeed, this cottage has a very strange, abnormal glow. Knight says: "That cottage is where the wicked witch lives, who wants to entice you in and is going to shove you in the oven and is going to turn you into gingerbread. I'm not goin' there." Knight echoes Joan Didion, who earlier wrote that Kincade's pictures "typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel."
A man in the plate business discovered Kincade's paintings, and through him Kincade entered that market, selling plates with his cottages reproduced on them and, as we see in old footage, "signing" them with a felt pen, for buyers. Another step: opening one-artist Thomas Kincade retail stores in shopping malls. Wikipedia reports there were a hundred of them, but their number has been declining in the last decade. This began in 1992, with cozy "galleries" manned by "moms." In these places, they had "artisans highlighting prints so they actually came to life." So they're painting on these "prints," to make the reproductions more "original," though not in any significant way, again playing on the naiveté of their market.
Art curator Aaron Moulton suggests that Kincade made his "art" more ubiquitous than even Andy Warhol, who consciously (and arguably cynically) sought that kind of ubiquitousness that comes with mass production and pop culture. In the nineties, Kincaid began making hundreds of millions of dollars and his company got a place on the New York stock market. He was very active, pre-internet, as a personality marketing his work wholesle live on the then busy auction site, "QVC." He became a persoality. Fans lined up for his autograph. They didn't know how bad he was. They thought he was good.
Susan Orlean pulbished a piece, "Art for Anybody" in the October 7, 2001 New Yorker, exposing Kincade to a more sophisticated public whose members might otherwise never have noticed his existence. (In fact his images just look like the same kitsch "art" that is produced by numerous other hands.) As Orlean says, speaking as a talking head, she "had discovered an empire." This brought out the polarization, the "culture wars" separating sophsticates from the unsophisticated. And Kincade, a public figure now, capitalized on that, lining up more publicly with light and goodness and family and God, and putting flags and old-timey porches in his pictures that denied the reality of America today or at any time. We learn here that in his younger days, after transferring from UC Berkeley, where he became depressed, to Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design, he had become a born again Christian.
Jeffrey Valliance, a contemporary artist with a teaching position at UCLA and the recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, put on "Heaven on Earth," a kind of museum show of Thomas Kincade paintings - his first exhibition outside his own self-promotion. Walking around in the show, Kincade said "It feels reverential." He thought he shoiuld collect the million dollars Susan Orlean had bet him there would never be a museum show of his work in his lifetime. Well, the Grand Central Art Center of California State University at Fullerton isn't a major museum, but Orlean made a risky bet, because a museum might choose to present Kincade not as an artist but as a cultural phenomenon, as this show in effect did by attempting to exhibit every kind of object ever marketed in his name.
The last segment of this film is an account narrated by his widow and four daughters of Kincade's decline and death at 54 due to alcohol and drugs, which he took up later in life. At the same time his business was also in decline, and being sued by galleries who claimed fraud, and, even worse: of his using the Christian connection to draw them in. "Being defrauded is awful enough, but doing it in the name of God is really despicable," they said.
Kincade not only represents the worst kind of "art" imaginable, but drags art down with the most egregious cheapening and commercialization of its name. You feel sick looking at the work, and then you feel even sicker when you learn about how it was used fraudulently to make a lot of money.
This is a conventional documentary that follows the trajectory of a life, so as it winds up we get pushed into the too-late intrervention and rehab story and the terrible personal decline, when Kincade, who had been a teetotaler and drunk fizzy water at his wedding, had become a raging drunk who groped women in public. It's a shame to get lost in this, but one speaker says something interesting: that Kincade's pretty-pretty art left him no room for the dark side of his life, his crummy impoverished childhood, his abusive father, and so on. There is a vault that gets opened up with earlier, less pretty-pretty work: but it was locked away so nobody could see it.
HIs work thus, in a way, killed him, because it provided no escape valve. But this perhaps ends on a wrong note. It's as if the film winds up failing to see the enormity of what it has been dealing with: this poisonous, pervasive culture of the kitsch. This fake "artist" who became a corrupt, fraudulent exploiter of the naive. It should be angrier. It should try to teach people something.
(Unmentioned here, reported by Wikipedia: that Kincade images dominate the art market in Asia, which has its own booming business in fake-Kincades. You can see a website where a post-Kincade "painting" is hyped, with a choice of 18 different frames, that has been produced by "Thomas Kincade Studios" producing "Kincadian" art with the same image in various formats selling for $200, $1,584, and $18,000.)
Art for Everybody, 93 mins., debuted Mar. 13, 2023 at SxSW, showing also at Boston, Seattle, Heartland, Philadelphia, Savannah, Cleveland, and SF Doc Fest. US theatrical release Mar. 28, 2025.
