Part Two: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
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,

(00:27):
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

(00:47):
I mostly used it as a vehicle to express a
lot of my anger at the Federal Reserve.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
He's the audience that you've written a thing and then
not read it.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Oh can I design the cover for this book at least?

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Please? Please?

Speaker 1 (01:34):
I'm enjoying our role over here. You're trying, you're trying
to save our jobs, and I'm trying to provoke you.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
But for me, Ron Paul isn't a man. He's really
just a friendly cat.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
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?

Speaker 3 (02:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
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

(02:48):
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,

(03:08):
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

(03:28):
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.

(03:49):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:32):
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

(04:53):
an original, Like, where are people going to get that
test done? Thomas? How are they you doing this?

Speaker 3 (05:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
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.

(05:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
You're going to get them off anyway.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
Toenails ever wax.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
You sickos that heard Robert say things about hair and
toenails and thought, ooh, I would want that to yourself.

Speaker 2 (06:19):
I'm going to stay off the subreddit this week.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Don't post anything we did, stay.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Off the internet.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
My mom always just keep that on the inside like
a winner.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, so critics.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
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

(07:02):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:45):
war against leftist intellectuals by buying my prints.

Speaker 3 (07:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Art, that's century defining.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
Piece of art.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
That's stunning, That is amazing, amazing, am that's like.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Bob Denver knocking down sl oh my god, like some
major actor.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
About across mediums?

Speaker 2 (09:03):
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

(09:25):
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

(09:48):
don't know, man, that's a little private to me.

Speaker 3 (09:54):
Yeah, I don't think I need to see that.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
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

(10:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Oh god, damn.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
I was gonna say Picasso would never, but Picasso probably did.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
I'm actually rather sure that he There's some some things
about him.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
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,

(11:01):
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

(11:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
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?

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (12:11):
Right?

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Like who would?

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah? I could make a bunch of prints of Popeye
and make extra money by just painting the pipe on
him afterwards.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, doing a little dash of brown first media.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
I promise I will not be doing that, Please don't.
I might.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Stop printing it.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
Just really love the Gold advertiser.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
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

(13:59):
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

(14:21):
sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to wake up
surrounded by Thomas Kincaid art.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
This is reminded me of kiss again, Like, don't forget
to get your Thomas Kinkaid coffin.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
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,

(14:55):
It's like I kind always knew you were a piece
of shit.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
Ge. You feel like it's likely to be around you.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
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,

(15:25):
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

(15:46):
whip his dick out on them, right, Yeah, I used
to know.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
He reenacted the bathroom scene from Wolf.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
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

(16:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
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?

Speaker 2 (16:44):
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

(17:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
Cross, sir, gross, all the.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
Things to piss on Winnie the Pooh.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:43):
Also he's called the Pooh and the pet it, right, Thomas, you.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
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

(18:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
So that's girls.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah we are.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:58):
I don't think that that's good for plants.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
It's good for some stuff, you know. Anyway, here's ads
ah we're back. We're thinking about peeing on things.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
No, always time you are, that's you, that's your.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
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

(19:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
Right.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
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

(20:17):
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.

(20:38):
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

(20:59):
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

(21:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (21:45):
Yeah, he was like that uncle everyone has.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, he's your drunkll he's heckling Sigfried and Roy.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
So I'm amazed. Also, there are women out there who
can say they gave lap dances.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
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

(23:10):
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

(23:30):
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

(23:51):
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

(24:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
Right. Also, this is something el Ron Hubbard shit.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Companies that you dribbled one dot of paint.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
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

(25:24):
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

(25:46):
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

(26:07):
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.

(26:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
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.

(27:17):
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,

(27:37):
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

(28:00):
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

(28:22):
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

(28:44):
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

(29:05):
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

(29:26):
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

(29:47):
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

(30:07):
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

(30:27):
their like retirement home in Scottsdale.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
It's a further kind of commodification of that.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
That's like seeing a painting of a gorgeous field in
a path, like, oh, that's the trial tears.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
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

(31:03):
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

(31:24):
very different artworks and they're quality. There's even as someone there.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
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

(32:05):
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.

(32:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
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,

(33:00):
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

(33:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
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,

(34:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
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

(34:46):
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

(35:08):
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,

(35:30):
all he's doing is he's selling emotional morphine.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
There must have been some creative drive in this man
at some point. There's certainly pain in his.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
True he's a more than confident artist and right do
what he was doing.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, and like, I.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
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

(36:16):
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

(36:39):
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.

(37:01):
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

(37:23):
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

(37:43):
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

(38:04):
time at strip clubs, drinking and abusing prescription drug drugs.
He's pissing on shit to show down.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Oh god, oh yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
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

(38:34):
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.

(38:57):
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

(39:18):
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

(39:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
There's a fucking limit.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, that's a bare minimum. Hey stop.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
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

(40:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
You're disgusting. You're disgusting.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
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,

(41:21):
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

(41:48):
oh oh God, it's got to be like a big
Garfield style cat. I feel like see.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
I was thinking of one of those monkeys that's kind
of colorful based with clown makeup.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
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

(42:17):
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

(42:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
It.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
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

(43:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
Doesn't deserve a dog.

Speaker 2 (43:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:45):
That use Subway does their franchises.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Though, Yeah, they just had a meeting about how they're
circling the drain too. But yes, I think you are correct.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
And you have to like, there's no way that they
didn't understand that this was going to destroy because they know.

Speaker 2 (44:02):
They're just trying to suck money out of these people. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
Yeah, this is like a no long term investment. This
is just get this guy's money. Our peat was sold
yea whatever.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
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,

(44:35):
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

(44:57):
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

(45:19):
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

(45:42):
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

(46:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Child that had puppets.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
They're all harrormarked movies. A lot of them focus on
how sinful Boston is compared to the countryside, which I
do approve of.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
I mean, I don't disagree now, but I find everyone
and everything there.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
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,

(47:20):
but Boston's top of the pack. I'll give it that.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
Yeah, public, it's the Boston city motto, Boston just go
ship over there.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
All the comments you're gonna get from your Bostonian fans.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah it's okay, it's okay. You know, I live in Portland,
the city of also shipping all over the place.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
It's a.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
You still Georgia in springtime? It just seems are everywhere.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
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

(48:43):
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

(49:06):
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.

(49:26):
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

(49:48):
cried for days. How could these beautiful works of art
sell for such a pittance. It's because they just printed
them out.

Speaker 4 (49:55):
Man.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
He really is the Trump of the art world, isn't.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
It's people who believed him there was a.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
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

(51:10):
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

(51:33):
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

(51:55):
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,

(52:16):
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

(52:39):
not an art story in the way that rich artists
caught drunk driving is. Maybe that's wrong, but it's just obvious.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
You remember that since this episode Camp Krusty, where like
Crusty shows up like.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
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.

(53:19):
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

(53:41):
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

(54:04):
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.

(54:25):
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

(54:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
Is that right? Is all way more setting to him? Yeah,
the death is a little sad. Oh yeah, no, everything
else is disgusting.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
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

(55:56):
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

(56:18):
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.

(56:41):
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

(57:01):
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

(57:23):
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

(57:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
At bit ship it is.

Speaker 4 (58:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
Oh no, that's impressive. Spent some time on that.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
You don't like him. I think that's a different.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
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

(59:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:36):
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

(59:57):
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

(01:00:18):
where I thought it was gonna go.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
No, no, well, you know, I'm always happy to hear that, Randy.

Speaker 3 (01:00:26):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
And all I can say is, I.

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
Don't feel like I have gone off compared to most
of your guests.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
Oh yeah, fairly low that. This is one of our
more low stakes bastards. For sure.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
There's no dead children in this episode that I'm aware of.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:01:00):
Just gonna say, uh huh.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
Look, there's literally.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
A national Cartoon to Society meeting next week. I'm supposed
to go.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
The word war crimes gets thrown a lot around a
lot these days, but it should be around here. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
That's gonna make a real awkward meeting next week.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Well, uh, you know, Hagi the Horrible. We'll see how
horrible he was next time. Randy, thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Yes, thanks for being around. All right, everybody. That's the
episode go to Hell. I Love you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
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.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter