Thomas Kinkade

Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, has been hailed as the most popular artist alive today. Working out of his Pacific Northwest studio, Kinkade has painted over 300 works— depicting lighthouses, cottages and street scenes— which have become a must have for millions of Americans.

People claim his art gives them hope and inspiration, a "three-minute vacation" from their everyday lives. Over 90 independent galleries across the country specialize in his prints. His work has appeared on Hallmark cards and catalog covers— material success that Kinkade attributes to the power of his positive message and the quality of his art.

Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, on the other hand, is the leading brand name of Media Arts Group, Inc. MAGI, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange as MDA, posted $120 million in net sales for FY 1999, a 53 percent increase over FY98’s $82.7 million. MAGI is the first company to create and develop what it calls a "lifestyle brand" around a product — in other words, the personality of Thomas Kinkade.

Using the strong sales of Kinkade prints as a base, MAGI has entered into numerous licensing agreements with companies like Hallmark, Warner Books and even Lazy-Boy (yes, Kinkade inspired Barcaloungers), and today the name "Thomas Kinkade" appears on hundreds of products, many of which bear little relation to his art. Indeed, MAGI’s corporate vision rests on the wholesale commodification of not just art, but an artist.

For instance, last year Fox launched a line of loungewear "inspired" by "Ally McBeal" called "…isms," meant to reflect the quirky yet introspective "lifestyle" of the show’s lead character. Sony is about to release an entire line of Britney Spears "inspired" make-up, shoes and clothes. Unlike traditional licensing, neither of these lines have very much to do explicitly with their "inspirations"; rather, they depend on the aura of the character to give themselves added marketability.

But there is something more insidious about the Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand. No one in their right mind believes that Ally McBeal is a real person, or that Britney Spears is anything except an entertainer. However, people do believe in Kinkade — they buy his art because they believe in his message. People believe in his "aura," his realness as a Christian artist. They believe him when he says that his paintings are "silent messengers in the home relaying messages of peace, hope, and joy."

What they don’t know, of course, is that all of these warm, fuzzy feelings are the product of cold manipulation by MAGI, and it is this uncritical belief in the "realness" of Kinkade that MAGI then uses for its own corporate benefits. MAGI’s chairman, Kenneth Raasch, boasts in a letter to investors that his company’s success rests on the sleight-of-hand interplay between the "lifestyle brand" (personality) and MAGI’s strategic vision:

Indeed, the juxtaposition between the public and the corporate face of Thomas Kinkade is striking. On the artist’s web page, Kinkade is praised (and praises himself) as an artist of the people, a savior of middle America from the clutches of godless New York postmodernism. Evoking as many American classicisms as possible in one paragraph, he writes:

I didn’t realize twenty years ago that the appeal of the simple life would become one of the enduring themes in my art. But I think simplicity is what really attracted me to these native American subjects. I imagine the purity of a world where all your material possessions can be packed on horseback and carried from one spectacular setting to another. Such a life, lived in perfect harmony with nature, is truly a work of art.

An accompanying analysis of his style and work compares Kinkade to Monet and Renoir and reveals that he, like other great artists, went through a troubled period in his life where he struggled to find his method. The analysis throws up all of the artistic stereotypes — recognized early as a talented drawer, sets off to find himself, attaches to a mentor, and after years of hard, isolated labor finally finds his style. He even took a cross-country "hobo hoist" to study the American landscape. One line is particularly juicy: "Thomas Kinkade studied the Old Masters – Rembrandt and Carravaggio, particularly – who exploited dramatic contrasts of light and shade with powerful impact. He experimented (that word again) repeatedly in his work, until at last becoming comfortable with lighting effects that he views as powerful reminders of God's presence in the world."

This is not to say that this is untrue — Thomas Kinkade is a real artist, and he may very well have studied Caravaggio. But what is difficult to swallow is that all of this is, in the end, a corporate marketing strategy, and what is disturbing is that no one knows it. Indeed, one has only to compare the friendly, shining accolades Kinkade heaps upon his fans with the cold financial analysis applied to his "consumers" on the MAGI page: "the strength of the lifestyle brand of Thomas Kinkade has been recognized by a variety of consumers and companies alike, providing an opportunity to continue to develop the brand."

MAGI claims that it has "changed the paradigm of art" by its focus on Thomas Kinkade as a commodified, marketable "lifestyle brand." Indeed, MAGI’s attitude toward art and its accompanying marketing strategy recall the great debates between high modernist and avant-garde cultural critics in the early 1900s. It was argued by Walter Benjamin, for instance, that the combination of reproduction technology (cameras, phonographs) and avant-garde art broke down once and for all the elitist "aura" of art. In the 20th Century, Benjamin and others recognized that anyone could own a Monet, or a Degas, and because of this the mystery and power of original works of art had vanished. For Benjamin, this was a good thing — art was no longer the province of the bourgeois, who had regarded themselves as the guardians of art’s "aura."

But for Benjamin, the "aura" of a work began and ended with the work itself — the artist himself, in terms of value, conferred little on the art. This, of course, changed drastically after the war, and indeed many companies profited by selling splatter-paint prints and yellow-and-mauve Marilyn Monroes simply because they had the names "Jackson Pollock" or "Andy Warhol" attached. But we had to wait until Kinkade and MAGI to see the process come to fruition — art, freed from its high-culture moorings, has drifted over the century into the arms of capitalism, so much so that in 1999, the entire concept of an artistic being — personality, style, body of work and consumption — is coldly and very quietly manipulated by corporations.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)