Thomas Kinkade: the artist in the mall

Abstract

Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall. Edited by Alexis L. Boylan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. 283, introduction, notes, bibliography, index, illustrations. By the time of his unexpected death earlier this year, the paintings of American artist Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012) could be found in one in every twenty homes in the United States, to say nothing of countless medical waiting rooms and office lobbies (Art and Design, New York Times, April 27, 2012). Yet few of us have ever seen an Kinkade. His reputation rests instead upon reproductions of his original paintings, which typically depict either cozy English-style cottages amidst verdant gardens, sturdy lighthouses perched at sea's edge, or quaint streetscapes of towns and cities circa 1930 to 1960, all painted in his signature style of dappled pastel colors rendering dramatic light effects. Kinkade's success has made him something of a household name, but it has also engendered the hostility of critics who deride him for pandering sentimental kitsch to a mass public. Refreshingly, the contributors to Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall avoid judgment and take the artist's popularity and ubiquity seriously, and, as a result, they are able to offer a series of probing and insightful essays that analyze Kinkade as a cultural phenomenon. The volume consists of eleven essays, each addressing a specific topic, from Kinkade's art-historical pedigree to the latent political and religious content in his imagery. Each author crafts a compelling, well-researched argument, employing high standards of scholarly rigor. What ultimately distinguishes this volume, however, is the cumulative impact of all eleven the essays on the reader, who gains a depth of insight, not just the breadth that is more common to monographs. I attribute this to two factors. First, the authors all pursue, more or less, the same methodology, an approach editor Alexis L. Boylan identifies as that of culture studies. Whereas traditional art historical scholarship focuses on canonical works of art and attributes their meaning to an artist's intentions and goals, these scholars seek to understand the diverse ways in which widely circulating, noncanonical, and commercially produced images are employed by everyday people to generate, reify, and sustain their worldviews. By privileging reception over production, this method acknowledges that meaning in images is generated through viewership and is therefore bound up with cultural values. Second, but related to the first, the arguments made by the authors speak to each other in subtle and surprising ways so that the volume acquires an unexpected intellectual richness. Indeed, by the time the reader has turned the last page, it is evident that the Kinkade phenomena is a force to be reckoned with, as it intersects so many aspects of contemporary American life, including consumerism, neo-conservatism, evangelicalism, urban planning, memory, nostalgia, and aesthetics. While summarizing each essay is not possible in this brief review, an indication of the kind of insight offered by the authors--and visual culture studies methodology more generally--can be had by delving into one of the book's common themes: the paradoxical nature of the Kinkade phenomenon, and the social and ideological work that the images do for their viewers. …