MIRANDA YOUSEF: ART IS FOR EVERYBODY (2023)

The most profitable art in the world is terrible art

Very bad art is the most pervasive (though it is not really art). Luckily we do not have to look at it. It is found in the houses of naive and tasteless people, who adore it. There are things that are off about this documentry film, starting with the title. Art, apparently, is not for everybody, and that is where the film first goes wrong. Art requires taste nd culture, and everythdy hasn't got those 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 this junk.

Thomas 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 pretext for this little documentary, which is as kitsch and naive in its way as the "art" it exposes.

The first shocking and depressing thing is to hearn that Thomas Kincaid 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 naive "art" collectors, people who have no concept of "art" but want to buy pictures to go on their walls. Kincaide 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 Kincaide and comments on how fast he worked. (Obvously Bakshi hates conemporary art, and like others who hate it, holds up kitch art as preferable.) Perhaps Kincaide thought of working for Disney, but this is not mentioned. A family man, he married and had ffour daughters, who, with his widow, are talking heads here. He got the idea of doing "editions." Essentially they are reprdductions he sold of his paintings with factory-added artisanal "touches" 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, then the canvas is stretched around a frame to make it seem like an original painting. The film lets those in the Kincaide business call these "editions," but they are not legitimate artistic "editions." They are merely expensive reproducions, sold by the artist's company.

Since Kincaide'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 Cotswalds 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 witer 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 Kincaide's, not. Kincaide'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 coruse Kincaide got his images printed on greeting cards and calendars and other saleable things.

Christopher Knight, of the Los Angeles Times, points out the "light" inside these "cottages" is so bright, they must be blazing with fire inside. Indeed, this cottage has a very strange, abnormal glow. He 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 ginger bread. I'm not goin' there." Knight echoes Joan Didion, who earlier wrote that Kincaide'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 Kincaide's paintings, and through him Kincaide 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 Kincaide retail stores in shopping malls. Wikipedia reports there were a hundred of them, but they have 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 offers that Kincaide 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 gecame 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 Kincaid to a more sophisticated public, who wmight 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 Kincaide, a public figure now, capitalized on that, lining up more publically 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. 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 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, put on "Heaven on Earth," a kind of museum show of Thomas Kincaid paintings - his first exhibition outside his own self-promotion. Walking around in the show, Kincaid 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 Orelean made a risky bet, because a museum might choose to present Kincaid as an artistic phenomenon, as this show in fact did, attempting to show every kind of object ever marketed in his name.

The last third of this film is made up of a report on Kincaid's decline and death at 54, which was due to alcohol and drugs, which he took up later in life, with his widow and four daughters reporting. At the same time his business was also in decline, and sued by galleries who claimed fraud, and even worse, of 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.

Kincaid represents not only the worst kind of "art" imaginable, but drags art down with the most egregious cheapening and commercialization of art. 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 Kincaide, 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 Kincaide'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 in a vault 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 Kincaide images dominate the art market in Asia, which has its own booming business in fake-Kincaids.)

[I]Art Is for Everyone[/I, 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.