Surprising to me, Thomas Kinkade's art was a runaway success, selling in malls and generating revenues in the multi-millions each year. This artist died suddenly over the weekend of "natural causes", whatever that means for a 54-year-old man.
I don't want to appear snobbish, but, in opinion, Mr. Kinkade's work seemed to appeal to a group of people in society, identified by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, as "traditionalists":
"… a culture of memory. Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its restoration. They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town, religious America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years from 1890 to 1903. This mythic world was cleaner, more principled, and less conflicted than the one that impinges on us every day today."
Sounds like a bit of the world of Ronald Reagan or the Tea Partiers, heh? The problem with this naive view is that time in the world - the end of the 19th century - was full of poverty, polio, discrimination (against women, gay, minorities, etc), and all sorts of economic and social ills that were never depicted in Mr. Kinkade's art. Hence, the artist created an idealized world that never was, a mythical Christendom, divorced from realities of that period. That's my problem with much of conservative American politics today: a fanciful harkening for a past that was not as wonderful as imagined.
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