This post was written by Patrick Rist on December 6, 2007
The word for today is “kitsch,” meaning something created to appeal to sentimental, popular or undiscriminating tastes. It is often an elitist word, used as a weapon to discredit that which is disliked.
But it is just as often used accurately. Certainly the art world is in confusion, and manifests a substantial amount of moral corruption, but unless we want to jettison all critical judgments, it should still be possible to distinguish between good art, not-so-good art, and kitsch. However, those distinctions and how to make them go far beyond what I want to discuss here.
Ask the average churchgoer to name a Christian artist, and sad to say, you will probably hear the name Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade’s work is (dare I say this?) the epitome of kitsch. While technically quite competent, his pictures present fantasy world of light, pastels, and imaginary settings that have nothing to do with our lived lives. In this sense, Kinkade’s work is akin to pornography. It tells lies for emotional effect.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Pornography is evil for multiple reasons. I would not say that what Kinkade is doing is evil. But it is misguided, and when one sees the level of promotion that sustains Kinkade’s empire, one suspects that he is painting to please a market rather than his Creator. And the two are not the same, even if the market is mainly evangelicals.
The question that interests me, though, is that even if we believe (as I do) that Kinkade’s work lies, what does our enthusiasm for the lies tell us about our desires? Are those desires legitimate? Could it be that Kinkade’s popularity tells us something about our souls, or at least about our vision for the Good Life?
Kinkade presents a life like this:
But in reality, most of us live like this:
The fantasy and the reality are so far apart, Kinkade could just as well include a Pegasus grazing in the front yard of his cottages.
But would not most of us rather live in the Kinkade picture, even if we wouldn’t hang it on our wall? Why is that? What does it say about how we want our lives and homes to be?
My suspicion is that Kinkade’s popularity contains clues to deep-seated longings shared by many, if not most Americans. The challenge is draw out these longings into the open. There they can be discussed, and compared to the decisions that we make as a people that condemn us to kitschy fantasy rather than a better reality.
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