The topic of art came up on a long discussion thread at Sarah Hoyt’s blog the other day, when another commenter posted a YouTube video explaining why the late painter Thomas Kinkade was at once so despised by art world professionals and yet so very popular among people who bought the prints of his paintings. I posted my own opinion, when the thread made a side turn into a discussion of what ordinary people chose to put on their walls to contemplate daily – and that was that Kinkade painted pictures that were popular with the consuming public and that he made a mint at doing so, commercially. This is apparently not the point of art, according to the professional art world. Art with a capital A ought to challenge, mystify, or discombobulate the public, and either the filthy rich or the government ought to pay for it … not the uneducated and unappreciative rubes who merely fork out their tax dollars for public art which looks like bronze or cement turds, an engorged lower colon, a pile of scrap metal or an overweight woman about to throw a performative tantrum in a fast-food establishment.
So – goopy painted landscapes of gardens, thatched cottages, lighthouses by the ocean, pretty churches with light shining out of stained glass windows, and misty cityscapes adorned with little flecks of suspiciously fluorescent paint are just … too crassly contemptable for words in the eyes of critics who think a banana duct-taped to a wall and the artists unnamed bed are just the ticket to fame and fortune in the official art world. That Thomas Kinkade made a bomb of money appealing to the masses is an unbearable insult to the Capital A-art crowd.
It’s just that most of us really don’t care to play the multi-million-dollar Capital-A-art money-laundering game. We don’t buy something to put on the wall to impress our friends with having spent a bomb on something that we suspect is just part of a scam, anyway. We don’t want to be challenged, or baffled or lectured every time we look at the stuff on our walls: we’d much rather have something pleasant, comforting, or even inspiring to look at. The commenters who participated in that side-thread all had things that they liked on the walls of their personal space: paintings and drawings inherited from artistic family members, things they had done themselves, or purchased from local artists they liked. I have a collection of prints that I bought as an impoverished junior airman in Japan; prints by a mildly renown mid-century artist, Toshi Yoshida. I loved them for the colors, and the traditional look of the scenes that he did: gardens, landscapes, city scenes. All very restful, and to me, aesthetically pleasing. I bought most of them unframed and at a bare-bones price, from a vendor who appeared from Tokyo once a month at the bazaar sponsored by the wives’ clubs. I did splurge and bought two of them framed – views of mountain country, covered in snow, with tree-branches piled in fluffy white, and pale blue shadows reflecting just what a snowy countryside looked like to me. Later, after I had spent a year in Greenland, I brought the unframed ones to a local art-framer that Mom knew, and we picked out individual mats for each and framed them all in museum-quality glass and simple wood frames. I am still not tired of looking at them. Should the house ever catch fire, after Wee Jamie, my daughter and the cats, if I had time enough for rescuing anything else, I would grab my Yoshida prints.
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