Obey your master

I went to the FSU MFA/BFA graduate show on Friday and found out Thomas Kinkade died on Saturday, the two aren’t really related but the two events have caused me to think about the banality of today’s art world. I don’t think Thomas Kinkade was much of an artist, I find his work to be simplistic and backwards looking, longing for a place and time that never really existed. I also don’t think much of the creative output of FSU’s BFA program, that isn’t to say that I find all of it bad, but there is a sameness to much of the artistic output of FSU art program.
I think art has largely made itself irrelevant in large part to the very fluid definition of what constitutes art, post industrialization, and arts unwillingness to engage with a broader audience. I don’t know if it’s fair to continue perpetuating the stereotype that modern art is nothing more than dog feces smeared on a canvas but I think for many people modern art is impenetrable. You can’t fault Thomas Kinkade for creating what is essentially McArt, nature abhors a vacuum and if modern art is going to ignore a large segment of the population then kitschy dreck is going to find public appreciation. This would be where FSU and art schools more specifically have failed both the public trust and the artists. I can say from my experience at FSU that the school seems intent on pushing artists towards something that would fit in at the art basel. Experimentation is fine, but the problem is so few of the teachers I encountered are good at actually teaching, it also doesn’t help that there are very few teachers in the first place, but I digress. In a perfect world a student would attend a university and its department would be staffed by full time teachers, unfortunately the reality of the situation is you have a population that holds contempt for any form of education and universities are now run as for profit organizations which means there are less tenured teachers and more under paid under trained adjuncts. At this point there are generations of students who have little understanding about the basic concepts of arts and teachers who frown on structure and encourage students to “feel” art. Blame also should be placed on the shoulders of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, by signing a name to a urinal forever sullied the definition of what art is and has birthed the horrors of modern art. How is a vivisected shark art, how is a photo of a crucifix in urine art; the fact that people seriously debate the merits of such stupid things goes to show how far art has fallen. Art has always chased after the providence of millionaires, today it’s the douchey Mitt Romney type but at one point it was the church. Perhaps museums perpetuate the idea that the past was filled with nothing but great artists, and who knows maybe it’s true but it is hard to believe there was a time when painting had the power to incite its viewer, when a painting could conceivably change the world. That’s not going to happen today; today art has become the abused handmaiden to the 1% forgetting the vast and large audience that exists who don’t have gobs of money.
This brings me back to Thomas Kinkade, one afternoon two years ago I made the mistake of looking through one of his “art” books. I was treated to page after page of candy coated schlock, one ungodly cottage and lighthouse after the other. I flipped to the front of the book and saw some of his early Plein Air works (I hate that phrase, plein air, just admit you are inspired by the impressionist movement and stop being so damn pretentious) and some of the backgrounds he painted for Fire and Ice. I was fairly impressed; those small pictures amid a sea of blandness showed more character then his entire body of work. Landscapes and Ralph Bakshi movies aren’t going to win you any kind of renown so Kinkade hit on a formula of creating images filled with bucolic hellscapes. I can’t fault him for wanting to make money on a consistent basis. I admire the fact that he was true to one principle; make money. Artists dream of having that kind of dough and public appreciation despite what a guy who paints in dung might tell you. His work is awful but you would be hard pressed to call it insular.
This leads me back to the art world and by extension the art schools of America, these entities forget that there is a vast potential audience for art that views a traced picture of a women in a burka with an AK-47 next to a lime green canvas as nonsensical. People want something that is less esoteric. I tend to think that people embrace his prints because it looks something and there is probably a fair amount of people wanting to buy his prints with the hopes they will be worth something; but mostly they buy it because it looks like something and that brings comfort to his viewers.

My problem with Kinkade and modern art in general is how banal they both are, it’s as if everyone has forgotten to speak in the language of painting. One thing that has always attracted me to painting is how economical it has to be in its execution. A painting will not ever have the time to slowly develop its ideas, there can be no narrative; one moment is all a painting has and in the past had a type of short hand to imply the larger ideas it wished to express. Most of this arose from the fact that you had a largely illiterate population at the apex of arts cultural importance and the images had to work on multiple levels. Largely painting today has become a much simpler beast and is worse for it. Kinkade and modern artists are not as different as they would have you believe, because both are ultimately superficial creampuffs. I understand that Kinkade wants to paint his faith and that he believes god is the light, but that is a shallow commentary on faith. How can something so shallow resonate throughout time, I’m not asking for a painting that speaks to or about the failure of organized religion but I want more than the broadest idea possible. A vivisected shark or a faucet dripping paint doesn’t reveal anything about the human experience, they exist as anti art; but following that path becomes a sort of zero sum game.
When I think about Thomas Kinkade and art schools I really feel sort of sad about the state of the world. It becomes a game of trying to define what art is and should be, and I like to look back at the breadth of what art was and see that it can be used to express the joy of human creation. I want to think that art is the gold in us. I look at the David removed from history, removed from religion, and see something that transcends the pettiness of human nature. That transcendence is what I want from art, I might be alone in that, but I would hate to think the art we have today is the best rumination of human life in the 21st century.