Barney & Clyde by Gene Weingarten; Dan Weingarten & David Clark for March 21, 2011

I like Kinkade to be fair I mostly like his jigsaw puzzles…

I wish someone would paint, “No Loitering” on that bench.

‘ear, ‘ear!

Thomas Kinkade is a great artist–Van Gough was a wackjob.

Surely you know, celecca, that the second ‘ear is superfluous…

I could have told you, Vincent, The world was never meant For one as beautiful as you…

The way Clyde phrased the question, I’d honestly have to say I’d rather be Kinkade. By specifying that Van Gogh was unhappy in his lifetime, that outweighs whatever reputation he leaves behind him. Does being considered a genius make him happy now that he’s dead? Kinkade, on the other hand, is probably VERY happy with his body of work.

If the question were “Would you rather be rich, even if it meant doing work you’re ashamed of, or do work that satisfies you, even if it never makes you a penny?”, then I’d definitely go for the latter (of course, it would mean I’d always need a day job).

“Wants to have his cake and eat it too.”

This applies to 95%+ of billionaires.

Of course, in light of the old joke “If you could be anyone in the world, living or dead, who would you want to be? The living one”, that’s another point in Kinkade’s column.

‘Tis better to be a live hack than a dead maestro.

Or, as Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”

True, Eldo, but I was using “day job” in its colloquial sense of “Don’t quit your day job.” As an artist (or actor, or writer, or musician, or what-have-you) you can (and many do) call yourself a professional artist (or actor, etc.) as soon as somebody pays you some money to do it, but the first step to really “making it” is when you don’t need some other job (waiting tables, pulling espresso, etc.) to pay the bills. That’s still a long way from being rich and famous, but it’s a significant benchmark.

Van Gogh (so the story goes) sold only one painting in his lifetime, and to keep body and soul together he had to borrow from friends and family. If he ever had a day job, I don’t know about it (that doesn’t mean he didn’t, it just means I don’t know that part of his story).

Kinkade can paint pretty pictures, and that certainly takes skill, and probably some native talent. He no doubt puts a lot of work into his paintings.

But there’s a lot more to Art than prettiness (often, prettiness is entirely beside the point). One thing about many famous abstract artists is that they were skilled figurative artists before they moved into abstraction. Mondrian (whose paintings inspired the Partridge Family bus) painted impressionistic landscapes before he moved into geometric compositions; looking at his early works, you can even see where his later pieces came from. These guys knew the rules before they chose to break them.

Kinkade painted the same themes over and over again. He may have been talented but he created mediocre saleable art for the American masses, and they in turn gobbled it up. That’s the problem with art in America: it’s not art unless it’s famous and monetizable.