San Francisco’s Kathryn Clark has some handmade quilts that are actually maps of neighborhoods with some of the highest foreclosure rates in the United States. She is one of four artists in Rochester Contemporary’s new show, “Work It” where four artists address labor and unemployment, an art topic even more dreary than crime faces.
Since the the recent art attack piece on 60 Minutes I’ve been thinking about the inescapable relationship between money and art. This weekend’s death of Thomas Kincaid, the “painter of light” who said that God guided his brush, was another interesting study. He’s regarded as the master of kitsch and genius of commercial marketing and had a signature Lazy Boy chair and a California housing tract designed after his painting. Joan Didion wrote “A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It 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. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
It’s easy to knock the guy but I couldn’t paint those cozy little cottages. I might be able to crank off some of these Obama paintings though. That is, if my heart was in it.
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Kincaid paid a stable of artists to paint his pictures, signed them and sold them as originals for six figures. In my opinion this is not marketing genius, it is fraud. It would make me choke to describe anything he touched as ‘art’.
What if mass produced “original art” contemplates its own fraudulence and kitschiness? (See J. Koons, A. Warhol) Is that cool?
Gotta say those four foreclosure “quilts” were beautiful on heir own and poignant when viewed in the context of the stated subject matter. Highlight of the show for me.