Also Media.
Oh Man, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. You know, this is part two of our episodes on Thomas Kincaid with Randy Millholland of Something Positive and in between recording episodes. We usually do both parts on the same day, and we'll always have a break in between so we can grab a little bit of lunch, you know, just have some minutes without the headset on, you know, recharge. This time, I sat down and I wrote an eighty six hundred words short story where Hitler and John Wayne Gacy saw
a series of murders in nineteen eighties New Orleans. And you know, I'm gonna be honest, I'm having some mixed feelings about it turned out more erotic than I had initially intended, and I think largely honestly, Randy, I think I mostly used it as a vehicle to express a lot of my anger at the Federal Reserve.
I think that was all expected from Ember one. Like, I'm surprised it's not more erotic. Yeah. Yeah. There would have been like a heaving scene where they talked about manhood, and.
I had to cut that because the Hitler gives a speech about the gold standard at the sight of the second murder that I really felt gone across something important. I'm gonna put it up on my substack, Sophie. Well, we'll get it out there for all the listeners.
He's the audience that you've written a thing and then not read it.
Sophie, you're not allowed to podcast the opinions I have about the Federal Reserve. They'll come for me, They'll come for all of us.
Oh can I design the cover for this book at least?
Please? Please?
I'm enjoying our role over here. You're trying, you're trying to save our jobs, and I'm trying to provoke you.
Sophie. I know you feel the same. That's the why we're business partners. You're just as angry at the Fed as I have. You know, you've been voting for Ron Paul for years before he was even in office, you know, uh, and we still write him in every year, for every for every position. You know, every county commissioner, Ron Ball, but for me, Rochel, Doccatcher, Ron Paul.
But for me, Ron Paul isn't a man. He's really just a friendly cat.
Well, Ron Paul kind of I think exists above and beyond the concept of sexuality, which is why he's so erotic. Anyway, Randy, are you ready to learn more about Thomas Kinkaid?
Okay, I'm terrified to learn more about Thomas Kinkaid. I'll be honest with you. You should be. He's gonna go downhill real fucking best.
It definitely will. We're back. Thomas started becoming a household name in the early to mid nineteen nineties, a time when collectibles were taking off in a big way. As we talked about last episode, this is the decade again,
Pokemon match with Gathering. There's this whole new subculture, and Thomas is aware of all this, and he's aware that I think I think part of what he's aware of is if you're a zoomer, you won't remember this, but millennials in the audience will recall every time you had Magic or Pokemon or you know, and Masters the Universe toys,
some new collectible craze take off. There'd be a chunk of the Christian right telling everyone that this was the devil, that like, this was Satan trying to get his hands on our children. And I kind of think the fear at Ferby's too right, and I d and d you know, which is less of a collectibles thing, but it still kind of speaks to the mood at the time. And
this is not something I've heard anyone else. Right, Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I kind of suspect part of what Thomas is consciously doing here is recognizing, well, for a wide variety of reasons, evangelical Christians cannot or don't feel comfortable buying into these other sort of collectible things. But they're they're people like anyone else. Whatever thing in the human brain gets ticked by collecting a bunch of shit.
They have that too. I just have to provide them with something that's safe, right, And I do kind of suspect that that's what he's doing, especially when yeah, yeah, because it's such the same thing, the artificially restricting the selection, right, the trying to get people to hoard stuff, convincing them these are investment vehicles. And he would also this is
kind of where things get fun. He started spreading insane rumors about the links that he would go to to make sure that his highlighted art pieces were like worth collecting, that nobody was getting a fake, right, then you were getting an original. Thomas Kincaid print, if you bought a Thomas Kincaid print that a real person had like slapped
a little bit of paint on a tree. For most additions were supposedly signed with ink that contained Thomas's DNA from either his hair or his blood to quote to prevent fakes, which I love because the insinuation here is that some of the thirty thousand dollars millionaires buying his art could afford to have the signature DNA tested somehow if they needed to prove that their Thomas Kincaid was an original, Like, where are people going to get that test done? Thomas? How are they you doing this?
Oh my god, does Thomas Kinkaid have something in common kiss? Because it was a whole story about them mixing their blood the ink for their Marvel comic.
Yes, And I honestly I think that more artists should do this, right, Like, when you get it, you should be able to listen to not just the normal edition of this podcast, right, that's for poor people. If you're if you're a man of means, you should be able to buy the exclusive edition of this podcast, which comes with a vial of either my blood or my hair. You know, you never know what you're gonna get, but something that was once a part of me, you know,
and all you have to pay. It's Sophie, it's just twenty two thousand dollars an episode. That's a bargain anyway. It's a collectionatile everybody guaranteed to appreciate.
You're going to get them off anyway.
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Toenails ever wax.
You know a special benefit for our online listeners who are crazy rich people with money. Every time you buying an exclusive Behind the Bastard's premier Collector's edition episode, you get three minutes of Hitler and John Wayne Gacy solving crimes in nineteen eighties New Orleans. Collect them all to get the whole story.
You sickos that heard Robert say things about hair and toenails and thought, ooh, I would want that to yourself.
I'm going to stay off the subreddit this week.
Don't post anything we did, stay.
Off the internet.
My mom always just keep that on the inside like a winner.
Yeah, so critics.
Honest, any rich person who's listening to your podcast is probably just getting ideas on what they're going to do with their wealth.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know how many of these twenty two thousand dollars collectors Edition episodes we're going to sell. Critics continue to dog his work, continue to dog his work somehow the whole I put my own blood and my signature on these prints didn't win them back. But as he grew older and richer, he got better at striking back at them, as this segment from an article in Salon makes clear. And in nearly every encounter with the press, Kincaid delivered a diatribe against the art world
establishment that had shut him out. They were elites touting unfathomable down or junk to hard working people who needed uplift. Instead, art snobs were the esthetic counterparts of the so called liberal elites. So he's doing culture war stuff with his two like your which is again he's he's not unique in this. That's really starting on the right in the nineties. To a significant degree, people are finding out how to
monetize the culture war. But he's kind of the first guy to mix that with like the collectibles industry, which I find interesting. Right, you are participating in a culture war against leftist intellectuals by buying my prints.
Its back to the whole vandals, they how many evangelis Like, you know the world is against you, but like here I'm with you. Now buy this prayer Vile of.
Water, right, yeah, exactly. Now. I should note here that one time Thomas said of Pablo Picasso he had talent but didn't use it in a significant way.
I'm sorry, what what a wild man to say that about? Yeah, Manna, not really much not not a lot of talent being used there, right, he kind of half passed his way through that that piece of.
Art, that's century defining.
Piece of art.
That's stunning, That is amazing, amazing, am that's like.
Bob Denver knocking down sl oh my god, like some major actor.
Oh god, It's like it's like he's talking about like some jazz musician who put out like one really great album and then like overdose or something where it's like, oh, it's a tragedy that he didn't, like, you know, master his demons and make more art. But like Pablo Picasso made a lot of very influential art. What are you talking.
About across mediums?
Yes, Jesus, what a what a wild thing to say.
I had a great experience like ten fifteen years back at a Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Intel and Nokia bought out the Picasso Museum for like a party, and so it was just like you're just kind of like walking through and on the walls are just like these these like draw like sketches that he had done too, including a bunch of him like having sex with his girlfriend, which I felt like, oh, I don't know, should they should this be up on the should this be up
on the wall of a well? Like, I don't know, that's not it's that creepy for you to draw depict your own relationship with somebody. It's kind of weird as the people running the museum to be like, well, yeah, we should stick this up on the wall. Like, I don't know, man, that's a little private to me.
Yeah, I don't think I need to see that.
Yeah, he does a good job of depicting what the beard looks like in that situation. If you're really curious that, you can learn a lot about good pretty good. These were These were all not thrusting pictures, I'll say that much about them. Anyway, It was a it was a fun time, Yeah, you could say that. So in nineteen ninety four, kay kN Kay took light. How I wonder what can kate? No, I don't. In nineteen No, he's about to He's going to sexually harass people later in this episode.
Oh god, damn.
I was gonna say Picasso would never, but Picasso probably did.
I'm actually rather sure that he There's some some things about him.
Yeah, almost certainly. In nineteen ninety four, Kincaid took Lighthouse Publishing public. It was initially very successful, raking in millions of dollars and shooting up the value of the stock to something like twenty or twenty five dollars a share. At its height, Kinkaid became the only working artist to, in Sue Orleans words, be a small cap equid issue. Right, he is this is unique, Like it's not unique for artists to like commercialize, but the way that he does it,
he's the only guy doing it this way. Ye. Late later in nineteen ninety four, he is named Artist of the Year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers, evidence that he had been spotted and appreciated by the sort of people who are making a fortune on the burgeoning collectible culture. Business Week named Lighthouse a hot growth company in nineteen ninety five, and from nineteen ninety seven to mid two thousand and five, Kincaid earned an eyewatering
total of fifty three million dollars for his work. This included almost twelve million dollars for these studio proofs that he retouched with highlights. Nice work if you can make.
It, if you if you find the suckers with the money. I mean, I don't know what to say. Like, I see nothing wrong with becoming rich off your work. I see everyone's cap selling your stuff out there, But I do hate the whole like grift part of it.
Yeah, there's definitely a degree of evil here. At the same time, if you have a chance to make fifty three million dollars painting trees on a canvas, who's not going to do that?
Yeah?
Right?
Like who would?
Yeah?
Yeah? I could make a bunch of prints of Popeye and make extra money by just painting the pipe on him afterwards.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, doing a little dash of brown first media.
I promise I will not be doing that, Please don't. I might.
I might, though, if you want to see me paint some pipes, you know, or paint once we get that Hitler Gayy art, you know, I could do a little I could do a little dollop a dollar a color on there, twelve million dollars.
Stop printing it.
It'll appreciate, Sophie. It's going to make the money. This is a great investment vehicle. You know, cash out your four one. We always go, you know, we always go fifty to fifty. Listen and I'm very pro cash out your four oh one ks and pick up some of our erotic hitler gayy art. You know, it's the it's the Bitcoin of the twenty twenties.
God, I feel like he bought these prints with paint on them. Are the same people who probably as ex silently by the Trump dollars yes yeah, or the Trump teddy bears.
These one hundred percent of his customers have since gotten caught up in a scam where they bought five hundred dollars Trump bills, and or or they are collecting Iraqi dinars waiting for Trump to get back in and revalue them like they are all born marks. That is that is who he profits off of. That's why there's one of these in every ten houses.
Just really love the Gold advertiser.
Oh God, we all love Gold. I mean it's again a great investment. Vehicle only goes up. Don't look at don't don't look into that. So as the business went on, Kincaid proved himself a savvy innovator. The people he brought on to advise his company once it started making millions of dollars seemed to have felt he was walking a tightrope, providing art that looked original and unique, but wasn't original
and unique in any sense. That mattered when Thomas told them he wanted to start offering different sizes of print and versions of his prints in limited products like mugs and lazy boy lounge chairs. Seriously, they hit lazy boy chairs. Yeah, yeah them. Yeah, I think like a or like a a what you'm gonna call it a landscape? Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to wake up surrounded by Thomas Kincaid art.
This is reminded me of kiss again, Like, don't forget to get your Thomas Kinkaid coffin.
These are not They're not very different people in a lot of ways. I think Jeene Simmons is a lot more honest because I'll say this, Thomas always pretends to not be the kind of guy he is Gene Simmons is pretty much the kind of guy he is. Right, One thing you can't say when you hear ugly stuff about Gene Simmons, you can't pretend he misled me. Right, It's like I kind always knew you were a piece of shit.
Ge. You feel like it's likely to be around you.
Yeah, yeah, I would have to take a shower shaking your hand. I just know that about you. So anyway, his investors, Kincaid's investors, when he starts putting out lazy boy chairs, are like, well, this, what if this devalues all the prints you're putting out. He's supposed to be investment vehicles. People are supposed to supposed to be serious art. This might make it look cheap. Uh and Kencaid replied,
fuck you, motherfuckers and whipped out his dick. I mean, not like literally with respect that, but also he kind of did literally because Thomas Kinkaid was the kind of guy who liked to assert his dominance in social situations, particularly business settings, by pissing on stuff. This is a regular thing in his career, so he didn't kind of whip his dick out on them, right, Yeah, I used to know.
He reenacted the bathroom scene from Wolf.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I used to know kind of like mid level drug lord, lower mid level drug lord who would do that whenever he showed up at a site. Is just like whip his dick out and start pissing all over the ground in front of the farm or something. You know. It's just that there's some guys who just have that in them that need to like this will this will somehow gain me a benefit in the situation. I prefer the uh I got this from the old upright Citizens Brigade, but the ass Pennies idea,
that one works a lot better. You know, look that one up kids, Look up the ass Penny sketch. If you ain't seen it.
When my Chather was tuned, if I wasn't giving her enough attention, she would just you know, pull her trainers off and peel on the floor. Made sure I saw it. And that's what makes me think of like, did no one put kinkaid in a corner or time out?
And don't maybe it because you're right, having spent time around a little kid, now it is one of the like one of the first levers that you learn as a little person. You can play. Is like, well, if I am not getting the attention I need, they have to pay attention if I start pissing on some Yeah, Thomas Kinkaid is just kind of stuck in that two year old stage. So for an example of how this kind of went, in the late nineteen nineties, he held
a company gathering at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. According to the Huffington Post quote, this one's for you, Walt the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Shephard, a former vice president for Kincaid's company, in an interview.
Cross, sir, gross, all the.
Things to piss on Winnie the Pooh.
And again, I would like to reiterate Kincaid's company currently has a license with Disney and does Disney Prince, Marvel Prince, and Star Wars Prince.
Yeah.
Also he's called the Pooh and the pet it, right, Thomas, you.
Do have to pay an extra fifty percent for one of the Winnie the Pooh prints that he pissed on. Those are a dwindling commodity. Now tragedy since signature now this incident him pissing on the pooh came up in a court case. That's why we know it. So this vice president had to tell this story under oath, and when Thomas was questioned about it, he told the truth and described that he was. He said that basically, this isn't a thing I did just once I am drawn
to quote ritual territory marking. Wow, very funny.
So does he own the one hundred day for when now? Because he wayne the poo to serve as dominance, I don't. That's how it works.
That how works, that's how that's how he got ownership of it from AA NILM. That old fucker just couldn't fight back, didn't have a strong his prostates been swollen up since World War One, so he can't even he can't even get a good stream. It's hard to fight when you were well, yeah that too.
So that's girls.
Yeah we are.
Don't don't be judgmental. Don't be judgmental. You know, the world needs all kinds. Without people peeing on plants, how will they get enough nitrogen? I think it's nitrogen anyway.
I don't think that that's good for plants.
It's good for some stuff, you know. Anyway, here's ads ah we're back. We're thinking about peeing on things.
No, always time you are, that's you, that's your.
I'm going to go I'm going to go out of the woods today and pee on some stuff, Sophie. So for a while the times were good, at least for Kincaid and his close and his closest allies. But their fortune was entirely reliant upon having a healthy garden of marks to keep funneling the money up. Because again, this is basically an MLM or a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not talking about most of his customers here. Most of them are misled by the sales pitch, as is the
case with multi level marketing. Though the big money for Kincaid isn't in individual sales. It's in convincing people who have startup capital to go in and invest in starting a gallery to sell your shit.
Right.
That's the part of this that really does look most like a pyramid scheme, right, because while Lighthouse is a public company, each Kincaid's signature gallery is a business owned by private operators, much like a McDonald's. Much of Thomas's work outside of painting was selling himself to the people who wanted to own Galleries. One of these people, last name Spinello, later claimed in court that Kincaid's personal life story was a big part of the sales pitch. Quote.
We were told success story after success story, and of course the Tom story and his Christian views and the way he runs his life. So these are like old retirees who have banked a few million and are being told like, oh, this nice Christian man is giving us a chance to really increase our wealth. He wouldn't lie to us. Look at what a good Christian he is now. Of course, like any man with this much money, Thomas was not living the chast and sober life of a
monk from an article in the La Times quote. In testimony and interviews with The Times, Shepherd and other former employees said they often went with Kincaid to strip clubs and bars, where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control. John Dandoy Media Arts Groups, senior director of retail operations from nighteen ninety five to nineteen ninety nine, testified in a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyl and Hyde character whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.
Tom would be fine, He would be drinking, and then all of a sudden you couldn't tell where the boundary was. And then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff. Dan doy, who left the company to become chief executive of a group of galleries owned by Kincaid's brother, recounted that about six years ago, the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried and Roy and Las Vegas that people
seated nearby moved away from him. I think it was roy Er, Siegfried or whatever had a cod piece on his leotards. Dan Deys testified, and so when the show started, Tom just started yelling cod peace, God, Peace, and had to be quieted by his mother and wife.
Wow.
Yeah, he was like that uncle everyone has.
Yeah, he's your drunkll he's heckling Sigfried and Roy.
You know.
That one's more or less. Look, I have I heckled floor shows in Las Vegas while too drunk to be controlled. Yes, do I do it every time? Absolutely? You know? Would I have done that to Sigfried and Roy? Possibly? You know, That's not why we're angry. I just thought it was a funny story.
So I'm amazed. Also, there are women out there who can say they gave lap dances.
To Thomas kinkad to the painter of light, which is a trademark. By the way, you can't call yourself the painter of light, only him.
I want to see a Thomas Kinka painting which a beautiful country lan that nice missed in the morning and the sun breaking through like the orange and red clouds on a strip club, just a side of.
The road, yeahing from the inside nowhere strip club with like a little Thomas Kinkaid out front, smoking a cigarette and thinking about how his life went so wrong. Yeah, why his wife won't return his phone calls. That's the art we need. So for a while his wife Nannette, was able to exercise partial control over Tom when they were together, but as the years went on, Thomas traveled
constantly for business. His gaalerries sold unevenly most of the year, but they always received huge bursts of sales, sometimes hundreds in a day, with lines out the block when he showed up to give a talk and personally highlight pieces. So he would have to travel around to galleries in order to keep sales going, and this leads to him being away from his wife and being away from any kind of like moderating aspects on his behavior, which leads
to him partying constantly. And this company culture where the employees who work for Thomas directly, like the Master Highlighters and his business managers and marketing people, come to view Thomas as something of a god, and his backstory is like this sacred text because he's he's worshiped. Whenever he shows up at one of these places, he has fans lining up out the door, so you can't really think
of him as this normal person. There's almost this like derangement that goes on for the people working beneath him.
And there's this this kind of cultic belief system that springs up within the Kincaid company itself, which is embodied by one of his business managers talking to the Guardian here and saying, quote, there's over forty walls in the average American home, and Tom says, our job is to figure out how to populate every single wall in every single home and every business throughout the world with his paintings, which is a deranged thing to say and want, but
it does. It does. Thomas Kincaid walked so that AI fucking image generators could run.
Right. Also, this is something el Ron Hubbard shit.
It is right that like there's something This is a big part of the narrative too, that like there's something healing about our paintings. People need them. And so you know the fact that Thomas himself is this messy drunk who does not live the actual life he pretends to live. The fact that we're charging an arm and a leg for these is justified because these are making the world better.
Companies that you dribbled one dot of paint.
On, Yes, yes, yes, these are part of healing the planet and bringing it back to God, as one line from a company Brocher noted. And the often hurried, unsympathetic and complex world we live in, the images Thomas Kinkaid paints offer a place of refuge, a place where the transient things of life give away to the things that matter most, faith and family, a loving home, and the people who know and love us. Now this all sounds patently silly, just an obvious, soulless grift, but Kincaid's work
really touched a huge number of people. The fact that I think they were wrong to be touched by what was a patent soulless grift by a man who did not believe the things he pretended to say to them didn't matter, right. And I gotta say one of the few people who try to grapple with this and do a really good job of it was was Joan Didion who wrote this about Thomas Kinkaid. The passion with which
buyer approached these Kincaid images was hard to define. The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip to buyers who already owned ten or twenty, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought the
viewing of the images a sizeable emotional weight. Right. These are these are early super fans, and there's a there's a degree of what you're going to see in trump Ism where once it comes out the kind of lifestyle he really lives, it doesn't affect his fan base at all. They don't care because what they need is not the reality of Thomas Kincaid. They need this like fantasy of who and what he is and what his art represents, and he's not a necessary part of that past. A certain point.
Well, it's like that with most like conservative Christian troops, Like look Jerry fallwell you know what happened, and he still had people. Fuck yeah, Jim Baker still has a career. He would write prison.
He literally went to prison. And it's I like Didion's criticism because she actually she actually looks into what's going on, like what is the actual meaning being transmitted beyond kind of the surface with his paintings in a way that is not like the snooty high art criticisms of his work. Didion drills down into some of the reasons his art is upsetting better than anyone else I can really think of.
And when she's doing this, she kind of One of the things she brings up is this year two thousand post on Concaid's website where he writes about a trip to the Yosemite Valley quote, when my family wandered through the National Park Center, I discovered a key to my fantasy, a recreation of a Millwok Indian village. When I returned to my studio began to work on the mountains. Declare his glory a poetic expression of what I felt at
that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Millwok Indian camp across the river as an affirmation that man has its place, has his place even in a setting touched by God's glory. Now, before we get into yeah in this Thamaskin Gade painting, before we get into Jones breakdown of why this is fucked up. First, here's the painting itself, right, you see, you get the mountains, sunset, lot of light playing through them. It looks like maybe
an early fall image. You've got a couple of very stereotypical looking teepees there. Oh god, yeah, Now it's a I gotta say, I did look into this. It's a you know, it's an idyllic image right inoffensive on its face. But I will say the structures that he puts, you know, in the hands of the Milwak is not entirely wrong. He seems to have based this on an actual display at Yosemite, so he doesn't get this totally you know, incorrect. It is true, it is. It is worth pointing out
the more common shelters used by the Midwak. We're what they called umotka, which is a conical barkhouse lined with pine needles. And layered outside with earth. Uh, and the Kocha which is a semi subterranean dwelling, and a lot of their the sun shelters that were kind of more temporary, rectangular and flat topped. But they did have shelters that looked kind of like this. So I will say his depiction is not like like, it's not super He didn't just like draw a random TP, you know, and this
is not a tribe that used anything like that. I think he based it off of a dediction of a million research at least. So yeah, I think he was just inspired by a thing that had done some base research and that probably explains it. But I did look into it because I wanted to know, like, did he just throw a TP on there because you know? Uh? And no that that that apparently is not wrong. So good, good,
That's one mark. There's one mark there, right. But Joan does a really good job of explaining what is messed up here, affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park visitor centers recreation of a Milwok Indian village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels. Not the least of which being that the Yosemite Millwalk were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush and allowed to
return to Yosemite only in eighteen fifty five. In other words, Kinkaid is commercviialized a moment from the past in the same way that this land was commercialized at a different, you know point with you know, in a much more violent way, and is kind of only capable of commercializing this moment that ignores the complexity and the pain in that history, right, because there's no room for complexity or
pain in his art, Right. We just have this kind of idyllic portrayal of a village that he's stuck on something that's supposed to go on some boomer's wall in their like retirement home in Scottsdale.
Right.
It's a further kind of commodification of that.
That's like seeing a painting of a gorgeous field in a path, like, oh, that's the trial tears.
Yeah, and you're kind of you're it's just kind of like ignoring what is more. I don't know, it's it's a very Kincaid thing to do. Uh. It is fair to say Now, the best criticism I found of his work came from a blog. Here's what's left from two thousand and five. The writer, identified as Michael is someone with a passing interest in art history who I think might have come from the evangelical background. And he he compares this piece by concaid that we started the episode with. Right,
you've got the cross up on the hill. You've got that big bright sunlight, you know, illuminating it with the painting that lightly inspired it by nineteenth century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. It's called the Cross on the Mountain. Now you can just see right there. Yes, these are very different artworks and they're quality. There's even as someone there.
Like some anguish to it, like the crowds. You can make gard that that's the blood of Christ, right, going back to my evangelical childhood. Yeah, you actually have Jesus on the cross, right, like the silhouette of the suffering and cross.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, I think those are all really good notes and it's worth anything that, like actually putting Christ on the cross is a thing that Caspar does in another similar work of art, the Cross and the Cathedral in the Mountains, and I think Cancaid's work is
kind of a hybrid of these two. Right. But you can see down there the cross in the cathedral in the mountains where you've got kind of these, You've got like basically this forest and there's a you can see a cathedral kind of coming up out of the forest in a way that almost makes it look like it's grown out of the forest. And again, you could look at this as another artist who, like Kincaid, painted the same shit over and over again, while he does a lot of crosses in the woods, right, But I don't
really think that's what's happening here. Caspar has something to say. He is showing Christianity, and this is something that was relevant to the kind of politics within Christianity at the time as an outgrowth of the natural world.
Right.
Michael in his write up quotes an art expert named Christina van Puyen, who says, of the first painting by Caspar, the cross stands at the brink of the evening horizon, which signifies the disappearance of God from the lives of the modern world during the Enlightenment. Yet the burgeoning of evergreens near the cross also indicates that a new religion is emerging. Colin Eisler has more to say about the
second painting. Protestantism, conveyed by the vehicle of the visual arts, tended to see Nature more as pagan mother than God's work, too close to pantheism for comfort. Friedrich presents an exception his anti classical emphasis upon experience, its reception and communication stress the personal. And I'm not quoting that because I am as I like, I'm not religious, I don't believe
in any of this stuff. But I'm quoting it because it's worth noting that with these pictures that clearly inspired Thomas's by Caspar, there's a lot to say, There's a lot to analyze. There's history wrapped up in that. You can you can see pieces of the history of movements of huge numbers of people and what they believe represented in his art, and there is none of that.
Right.
The point Michael makes in his criticism is no one will ever have this much to say about the meaning held within a Kincaid work, right, Yeah.
No, you're right. It's weird because like you look, thinking cad painting next to those, like you know, the paintings, there's just again a lot of emotion, use of color to to conbay how you're supposed to feel how he feels about what's going on, and it's not necessarily bright and cheery. But he also let's talk about what's you know, this feeling of Christianity, the suffering of Christ et cetera, or even like you said, the church growing out of nature.
And Thenkincaid's like, wow, he painted a lens flare.
Yeah, he put a lens flare on a cabin. And there's also you can s in these two different works made at different times, they're clearly the same man, but like who has grown and changed over time? Right Like, they look different as opposed to every Kincaid painting could have been made at the same time, Right Like, it's kind of impossible to even even mark out is it
an early period or a late period. I'm sure there's some weird Kincaid historians, but the rest of us aren't going to do that, right Yeah, And I guess the point I'm making here, and I think the point that these critics are making that Jill makes is that kin kid all, it's not that what he was doing in his art is he's not like purposefully being like racist against Native Americans. But the inability of his work to ever deal in anything that touches on sadness kind of
means that he's always going there. There's a shallowness, a one sidedness to it that is kind of gross and gross and commercial when you are you're touching on something where there's a darker history there. Right, But Kinkaid's whole life, all he's doing is he's selling emotional morphine.
Right.
There must have been some creative drive in this man at some point. There's certainly pain in his.
True he's a more than confident artist and right do what he was doing.
Yeah, and like, I.
Don't think again, there's nothing wrong with like, I just want to make art that makes people happy in it, Yeah, But there's just some things that are kind of hard to like.
Yeah, And there's an it's not just that he wants to make them happy, there's an ideology behind what he believes will make people right, and that ideology is social conservatism. Laura Miller makes this very clear in an article she wrote for Salon. Thomas Kinkaid the George W. Bush of Art, and that title isn't just her being kind of like shitty quote. Hermann Brock maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is ethically depraved, a criminal, willing, radical evil.
The novelist Milan Coundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That's a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings. But Kincaid was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology. Candera defined kitsch as the absolute denial of shit, meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn't necessarily follow that art wallows and shit, but art doesn't exist for the
primary purpose of denying it either. Kitsch is first and foremost a lie. Its very existence is founded on bad faith. And the best example of that is the fact that Kincaid is an official member of the George W. Bush Presidential Prayer Team, from whom he received an award right.
He is a friend of George W. Bush, He met him a number of times, and he's this it's this flattening of American culture during this period where we are taking a very dark turn, where we are invading two countries where there are huge numbers of deaths overseas as a result of American action, and ken Kaid sees his goal not just to pray for the guy behind a lot of it, but to sell people during this time when they're scared and upset about the violence that they
are a part of, to calm them down with these anesthetizing pieces of art. Right, he really does see his goal as that, right, like, keep pulling the lever and voting for Republicans. Here's a nice picture of a cabin. Now you can feel comfortable as you like slide off into sanylity. Right, that is what Thomas Kinkaid is doing.
And while he's doing this and portraying himself as this upright Christian pinnacle of like you know what the evangelical spirit can achieve, he is spending all of his free time at strip clubs, drinking and abusing prescription drug drugs. He's pissing on shit to show down.
Oh god, oh yeah. Yeah.
He's also doing he's fucking, he's mixing like hard liquor and valium a lot. And he's also sexually harassing and assaulting his employees. In the court cases that we've been building to and have quoted from earlier. In this witnesses testified as seeing Thomas at one of the many signing parties for his paintings. He got so drunk he fell off a barstool and per the Huffington Post, palmed a
startled woman's breast. Then when the wife of a former employee tried to help him out up, he cursed her out. Now that's an ugly story, but much worse is the tale of a company party at a motel in South Bend, where Thomas met with a group of signature gallery owners to sign a bunch of their prints. This meeting came about because Thomas had convinced all these men and women to invest their savings into starting galleries for his art.
He promised themselves and ever escalating profits, and by August of two thousand and two, those profits had started to stall. So the event was a good will gesture. But later in the night there was an open bar and Thomas got very drunk, next per the Huffington Post. At one point, according to testimony and interviews with three others who were there, Kincaid pulled the men in the room about their preferences
in women's anatomies. He was having a conversation with the men in the room about whether they liked breast or butts, said Lori Kopek, Coat's director of gallery operations, who also testified about the party. There were only two women in the room, and I was very uncomfortable at that point. It was during that bowdy discussion, according to arbitration records, that Kincaid turned his attention to the other woman. He approached her and palmed her breasts, and he said, these
are great tits. Ernie Dodson, another Coat employee, told The Times, adding that he drank no alcohol that night. I was just standing there in the corner in amazement. It was like holy cow, and man, Dodson, I'm not really impressed that you didn't drink. You didn't like stop him, You didn't do anything. You didn't say like wow, boss, that's like fucked like you.
There's a fucking limit.
Yeah, this is really a step in moment. Brother. I'm not impressed that you didn't drink. I'd be more impressed if you were drunk too, and you had the moral presence to just hit the guy, right, don't do that.
Yeah, that's a bare minimum. Hey stop.
Yeah, that's gross. Man. This is a fucking company gathering and you are grabbing someone's tits. What the fuck? Anyway, when this came out, Kinkaid denied the allegation. He said this in a deposition. You've got to remember, I'm the idol to these women who were there. They sell my work every day. You know, they're enamored with any attention I would give them. I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night. Hey, buddy, quick
tip here. I was too blacked out to know what kind of quote unquote flirting led to me groping someone. Not a defense anyway.
You're disgusting. You're disgusting.
You know what's not discuss though, Sophie. You know what makes me feel good? What makes everyone feel good? Yeah, well, we maybe don't say groping, but we do in it emotionally in the same way that John Wayne get. We're back, and I've just had a word with our own HR department. I apologize. I have deleted roughly a third of my short story it Yeah, yeah, I mean again, Sophie. It is mostly about the Federal Reserve ute. It later, Yeah, okay,
thank you, thank you. Smut it up some sona b oh oh God, it's got to be like a big Garfield style cat. I feel like see.
I was thinking of one of those monkeys that's kind of colorful based with clown makeup.
Mm. Yeah, that's a good one because that'd be really scary to get murdered by too. This is good, this is useful stuff. So the company, messaging to prospective gallery owners, painted a very different picture of Thomas. Lighthouse used terms like partner, trust, Christian, and God, arguing that not only was a Kincaid gallery a good investment and help you serve a higher calling, i e. God wants you to get rich selling Thomas's paintings now, Yes, yes, very much so.
And Thomas would always deny to the press that he marketed specifically to Christians, but as limited edition prints each had Christian fish symbols printed on them along with Bible verses, his favorite being Matthew five sixteen let your Light Shine before Men. One of the people who fell for this
was Jim Coate. Coate opened his first signature gallery in nineteen ninety six and claims that at the start, sales were great because Tom at that point was very popular and there were limited outlets to buy his art, but as the years went on, the situation deteriorate.
It.
As the La Times reports, Coate alleges Media Arts Group, which is what the company becomes known as, pushed him to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own outlets in his territory. Coate eventually had three stores, all of which failed. This is not bread and milk, he said. You can't have galleries on every corner. Cot said his net worth was of more than three million dollars had been erased gone or his marriage, his house, in most
of his possessions. He doesn't blame his divorce entirely on his galley's failure, but it certainly didn't help. He shut his last door in December and has filed for bankruptcy protection. At this point, I've got a dog in an apartment and that's it. This is not where I thought i'd be at fifty six.
Doesn't deserve a dog.
No, I mean, I'm sure he sucks too, but it is. It is interesting the way this con goes right where he's like, okay, you've bought one with If you don't, you got to set up another like a block away. Otherwise we're going to set up one and run you out of business by undercuttry isn't.
That use Subway does their franchises.
Though, Yeah, they just had a meeting about how they're circling the drain too. But yes, I think you are correct.
And you have to like, there's no way that they didn't understand that this was going to destroy because they know.
They're just trying to suck money out of these people. Yeah.
Yeah, this is like a no long term investment. This is just get this guy's money. Our peat was sold yea whatever.
Well, it's even worse than that, because he's not just screwing these people to suck money out of them, he's screwing these people to crash the stock value of the company because Kincaid makes a bunch of calls in the early two thousands that a lot of people will argue and has been argued successfully in court, were deliberately made to tank the stock from a high of almost twenty five dollars to a less than three dollars a share, and then once the value of the stock had collapsed,
he bought his company back and took it private. This is what causes that court case, which concludes in two thousand and six, and found that Kincaid's company had deliberately misrepresented itself to perspective gallery owners for the La Times.
The arbitration panel found that the company and Barnett, who ran a training program for prospective gallery owners known as Thomas Kincaid University, painted an unreal, realistic, and misleading picture of the prospects for success and never warned potential investors of the inherent risks. We were told success story after success story, and of course the Tom story and his Christian views and the way he ran his life, one
of the gallery owners told the arbitration panel. Now, this panel ultimately rules in favor of two gallery owners from Virginia who had sued him, awarding them almost nine hundred thousand dollars in damages. These people, all of whom had had money to burn when they started talking with Kincaid's people, are the least sympathetic of his victims because a lot of regular, not rich people got scammed into buying crappy princess An investment too. In the early two thousands, Kincaid's
company started publishing books. A write up I found in Salon describes them all as being made by a semi industrial process, just like his highlighted paintings. In short, he would write an introduction and presumably approven outline, and then someone else would write the novel. Now you can compare this to his old friend whose Dinotopia books were labors of love. Whatever else you might say about them, it's it's clearly the Yeah, it's clearly the work of someone
who cares deeply about telling a dinosaur story. Time with it. Yeah, yeah, I remember them very fondly. I haven't picked them back up since I was like twelve, but I remember them fondly.
Child that had puppets.
See now that I didn't play ship, that sounds awesome. So all these books, as best as I can tell her about quaint small towns. Generally, there will be a woman who comes from the big city with a big job that's stressing her out, and she comes to a small town and she gets swept off her feet by some like farmer who convinces her the real joy in life is having a bunch of kids and no longer voting.
Uh.
They're all harrormarked movies. A lot of them focus on how sinful Boston is compared to the countryside, which I do approve of.
I mean, I don't disagree now, but I find everyone and everything there.
Yeah, I mean it is the city of smells, like, that's what we all about Boston. Yeah, the city of piss. Look, Los Angeles a lot of good piss. New York great piss town, you know. But but Boston, of all the towns that smell like urine, definitely, well maybe Philadelphia anyway, There's actually a lot of towns that smell like piss, but Boston's top of the pack. I'll give it that.
The day I moved to Boston, I was walking through Cambri like Harvard Square, and I turned a corner and a woman was holding her like five year old kid over like a potted plant on the street. It like it was from Texas, where it's like Boston over there.
Yeah, public, it's the Boston city motto, Boston just go ship over there.
All the comments you're gonna get from your Bostonian fans.
Yeah it's okay, it's okay. You know, I live in Portland, the city of also shipping all over the place.
It's a.
Look you want to talk about shit, go back to the idealized like nineteen twenties. These people imagined back when there were horses all over everything. O. God, that's a lot of shit. You know, we barely shit in our cities compared to how much shit do.
You still Georgia in springtime? It just seems are everywhere.
So what I find most interesting about this Salon article about Thomas's shitty Kincaid novels is how the writer describes the reaction of Kincaid's fans to a negative review of the first book in the series, WHOA. Well, No, Actually this is a little different because this comes out after he's kind of been started to be disgraced. I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings and Thomas Kincaid's signature galleries essentially mall and shopping
district outlets for his prints, and been fleeced. I didn't really understand how the financial architecture of Kincaid's gallery empire worked, and I shouldn't share their taste in wal art. But these people struck me as decent and sincere They believed Thomas Kincaid not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his art, one in which, to quote Kincaid's introduction to Cape Light, people have the time to save her life simple pleasures and
lead deep, satisfying lives. It's not hard to find accounts like these of people who purchased Kincaid Prince's investments and feel ripped off. I found one letter in a medium post by Charles Bodelaire, who apparently takes art questions from fans. Dear Charles, I have four original oil paintings by Thomas Kinkaid. I bought them about twenty five years ago and paid six thousand dollars for each of them. I love them and it gives me great pleasure to look at them.
But because I am moving to an assisted living facility and will have no room for these paintings, I need to sell them. I thought i'd at least get my money back, and was shocked when the best offers I received were between three and four hundred dollars each. I cried for days. How could these beautiful works of art sell for such a pittance. It's because they just printed them out.
Man.
Sorry, I don't want to make an old man feel bad about painting that bring him happiness in his twilight years. But like that is what happened. You got ripped off. I'm sorry, Like, I mean one thing.
They said, Hey, by these paintings, aren't they pretty? You'll just enjoy looking every day? Cool? Great? Yeah, but he was told it was investment, was going to appreciate.
Yeah, exactly. If someone wants to pay thousands of dollars for a painting that looks pretty like I do, that's not a scam unless you're making them think that this is something that will make their money appreciate, you know that. Yeah, that's a bummer.
He really is the Trump of the art world, isn't.
He's the Trump of the artworld? That's exactly. Yeah. When I may steal that from you for the title, and then you can take me to court. You know, we're gonna we're going to spend the rest of the twenty twenties litigating and seeing I'm hearing about.
It's people who believed him there was a.
Fucking university, Yes, yes, for teaching his gallery owners how to get fleeced. As the early two thousands faded into the aughts, Kincaid was still a big business, although the number of galleries devoted to his work and plunged from a high of three hundred and fifty to something like half that. So he's still a big business. Yes, that's not a that's that's bigger. I mean there's no other single artist you can say that about really anyway, there's
any artists on earth like that. Yeah, Now that just maybe Disney being actually caring about having a sustainable business right now. Somewhere around two thousand and eight or two thousand and nine, his marriage fell apart and he and Nannette separated. Kincaid does seem to have loved her despite his achieveding, and included constant references to her and their
marriage in his work. He would like put their the date of their anniversary and paintings after they had split up, and he seems to have spiraled increasingly once she left. His drug use in drinking grew more severe. The Daily Beast describes one December twenty ten event that shows his mood well quote. Fans in Denver had been promised a thirty minute inspirational presentation. What they got was an ungroomed, under addressed speaker who was none too pleased with the
media's coverage. Of his recent arrest for drunk driving, stays in public and I make a headline. He sneered. Then he complained about the media's lack of attention to his charitable works. America's most known, most beloved artist shows up in an Orange County hospital. We threw in all day, kids of it. We hosted art contest. We gave art packages to all the kids. I talked to them about journaling their life, about creating something every day that makes
a statement. And we sent word out to every newspaper. Come down, see this day of joy, this day of celebration. No one showed, but make one wrong step in public and they put it on the front page. Yeah, man, Thomas Kincaid gives kitchy fucking journals to sick kids. Is not an art story in the way that rich artists caught drunk driving is. Maybe that's wrong, but it's just obvious.
You remember that since this episode Camp Krusty, where like Crusty shows up like.
So when he finishes, Kincaid asks the organizers to make sure that his room is alcohol free, and then he keeps the owner of the Colorado Concaide Gallery up until like the early hours of the morning talking about his ex wife. Just a perfect picture of a man's spiraling and Thomas, this is definitely the terminal part of the spiral. A month after that event, he spends ten days in jail on his DUI charge. He tries to get sober after that, but he just keeps relapsing, falling back into
drugs and alcohol. A little over a year later, he has found unconscious. He spends several days in a coma, and when he wakes up, the doctor say basically, hey man, you have to sober up now or die. You don't get more chances, right. This isn't the kind of thing where like you can dry out for a while and then get back to the drinking and drugs. This is it. If you fuck around anymore, you're dead. And, as is
often the case, he does not take this warning. Two months later, on April sixth, twenty twelve, he overdoses and died. Thomas Kincaid was fifty four. Reporting after his death revealed that he was actively under federal investigation for securities fraud. So there is some suspicion that maybe this was suicide. You know, it's possible, right. He apparently was again a lot of crimes associated with this, the Painter of Light, Trump of art World, the Trump of the art world.
The immediate wake of his death saw a huge surgeon sales. Fans gathered at fifty some galleries around the country in a public wake, and then the autopsy report came out, which showed that he had died of acute alcohol and valium intoxication. I think most of his followers, some of them are surprised, but it doesn't really reduce the amount
of love for his work. I actually find some of the writing on this gross where they're like, haha, this man, like like, look now everyone's going to stop liking him because he owed Dean, And it's like, I don't know, man, A lot of artists people love that kill themselves with That's kind of the norm for artists that people love.
Yeah, that also pains additions of personal failing and addiction is a disease, Like I'm not coold with that, Like you can hate someone but also be sad that they fell down addition.
And I would say the fact that he, after splitting up with his wife, fell to addiction is not contradictory to the Christian values and the same way that the fact that he is sexually assaulting people and committing securities fraud.
Is that right? Is all way more setting to him? Yeah, the death is a little sad. Oh yeah, no, everything else is disgusting.
Yeah right. Uh so what did more damage to his memory was the fact that there's this horrible legal fight afterwards between his ex wife and his new girlfriend, who claimed to have letters that he wrote her while drunk promising her a bunch of his assets. The matter is offitually said, eventually settled out of court, but it made it kind of impossible to hide the unsavory elements of
Kincaid's legacy. Now, if you have paid a tension at all to how evangelical Christians responded to Trump's many foibles and amoral acts, you're not surprised that a lot of people continued to love Kincaid after all this came out. His company is still around. It's opened up to new artists and even branded content, so obviously they've seen need to expand since his death, But by all accounts, he
is still an exceedingly profitable artist. Thomas, though, now has to rest in the eternal hell that awaits all artists, because if your work is notable enough to be discussed in any fashion, any fashion, some critic is always going to get the last word, right, if your work is worth talking about, it's always going to be a critic who gets the last word, because you're going to die someday.
And in Thomas's case, some of those critics were scholars from the British Journal of Aesthetics who conducted a study to see if they could quantify how bad his art was.
This study, mere exposure to bad art, tested whether or not repeated exposure to Kincaid's work would cause someone to like it more or less, and they paired Kincaid the control group was a better artist, right, somebody who had had like a general level of critical you know, acclaim And after repeated viewings, participants reported no change in their appreciation of the good art quote, but repeated viewings of the Painter of Light prompted strong negative emotions, with participants
saying they liked his stuff less each time it popped up in front of their eyes. Now Here are those result reactions in graph form taken from an earlier unpublished form of the research. And yeah, it's a you know, there's a theory that this may be because exposure to Kincaid over time makes the flaws and his work glaringly obvious, and so people come to hate it the more they look at it. This is clearly not true to as many fans, but it does lead lend some comfort to
the rest of us. Right if you are like I find this this guy like more upsetting every piece of art that you've shown of his their scientific backing for that, you are in the norm, So good news there, and.
At bit ship it is.
Really it's incredibly petty for a dead man who like died in a very sad fashion alone of an overdose, to be like, let's see if we can scientifically prove he sucked.
It's some of my disdain for for critics in general, because there is such a I need to prove why. It's not opinion, it's fat proving. No, Oh my.
God, it's the pettiest thing I've ever heard of, And I respect. There's a degree to which you have to respect that level of petty.
Oh no, that's impressive. Spent some time on that.
You really put in the effort to hate this guy's paintings, And I guess I just wrote eighty five hundred words about why I don't like his art. So I'm not that petty, but I'm certainly in the upper level of why.
You don't like him. I think that's a different.
I do not that is that is fair. I believe I felt this for a long time. The only the real valid artistic expression in our society is reprinted T shirts of Bart Simpson during the Gulf War. You know, that's that's all. Great art is just some kind of reprinted Bart Simpson T shirt made in order that the generated so they did. Yes, of course, of course, yes, any any early nineties illegal Bart Simpson merchandise is art and nothing else is anyway, plug your art.
Wow. So uh you can see my my mean spirited comic at somebody positive dot net or at mousetrapped dot blog. Is another thing I do. I also draw the Sunday Popeyes at comics Kingdom dot com slash Popeye, and if you go to Comics Kingdom at com slash, I believe it's hold on. I not prepared, That's why would I be. I'm still winded by I did not expect this to have sexual assault. Yeah dot com slash all of hyphen Popeye Tuesdays and Thursdays is new strips. There, I knew
the Thursday strips. Yeah wow, I that did not go where I thought it was gonna go.
No, no, well, you know, I'm always happy to hear that, Randy.
Uh.
And all I can say is, I.
Don't feel like I have gone off compared to most of your guests.
Oh yeah, fairly low that. This is one of our more low stakes bastards. For sure.
There's no dead children in this episode that I'm aware of.
Yeah, no dead kids. You know, some old people lose their savings. Definitely a sexual assault or too. Yeah, but not not our worst, not our worst. But you know, next time we have Randy on and I finally reveal the dark truth behind the person who does high and Lois, I'm.
Just gonna say, uh huh.
Look, there's literally.
A national Cartoon to Society meeting next week. I'm supposed to go.
The word war crimes gets thrown a lot around a lot these days, but it should be around here. Yeah.
That's gonna make a real awkward meeting next week.
When I will wait until I publish my investigation and we get the high end Lois person up in front of the Hague. Uh, which one is there is there a couple I don't know much about. Hyan Lowis I'm gonna be.
Hi and Lois is technically a spin off of Beatle Bailey. I believe more Walker and I believe it's the it's his kids, and I believe that the kids behind the creator of Hanger the Horrible.
Well, uh, you know, Hagi the Horrible. We'll see how horrible he was next time. Randy, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Yes, thanks for being around. All right, everybody. That's the episode go to Hell. I Love you.
Pleae. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.