Part One: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
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- Опубліковано 17 вер 2024
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Part One: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
Robert sits back down with Randy Milholland to discuss Thomas Kinkade, the most financially successful American artist and con-man.
Original Air Date: August 27, 2024
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There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
New episodes Wednesday and Friday with backlog episodes on Saturday until we catch up.
#BehindtheBastards #BehindtheBastardsPodcast #RobertEvansBehindtheBastards #BehindtheBastardsMerch #BehindtheBastardsJohnLandis #BehindTheBastardsHost #BehindtheBastardsIvermectin #BestBehindtheBastardsEpisodes #BehindtheBastardsBestEpisodes
My ex-mother-in-law once called a Thomas Kincade painting a "Kinky" and I may never recover
Some people just need that kink aid to get off
Totally stealing this lmao 😂
Yes, this would lead to divorce. I don't want those genes in my pool.
That's what they call 'em in the fan club 😂
@@mercerblackwell there's a fan club?? Seriously??
OK, let me preface this by saying that I love Randy's work. I had never seen an image of him before and my first reaction was "We have Alan Moore at home." I apologize in advance if Randy sees this.
Hey, that's not fair. He's been trying to get into a Rasputin lookalike contest for years.
For the record, this is a joke. Sorry, Randy.
@@daniexists6 No, no. Robert is Rasputin.
Randy seems mostly surprised he still exists.
@@bergec0they can go as young and old Rasputin 😂
Gotta hit that “Artists that look like ancient and powerful wizards” demographic somehow!
Andy Warhol - "The production line commodification of art is bad"
Thomas Kinkade - "You had me at the production line commodification of art."
Except Warhol didn’t say that. He thought it was good because Andy cared about money above all things. And in fact, Warhol’s works are at the center of much that is wrong with the art world today. From the Mugrabi collection to the Warhol Foundation, power is brokered via auction houses, high-end galleries, and NGO’s like the Pew Charitable Trusts that control public museums, to engage in a cyclical scam of releasing a few works for “tours” of major institutions to increase visibility, then selling those or similar works by the artist for record-breaking (and tax deductible) profits and money laundering. Enough for an episode of this podcast to say the least.
which is funny.... Andy Warhal is some of the most commercial art.
@@KimberlyBishh That's kind of the point.
@KimberlyBishh just like the other person said, that's literally why he got famous. Pop art was a big middle finger to the commodification of art andy warhol was seeing infect his profession.
This is EXACTLY what the person in charge of Popeye The Sailor should look like.
He looks like he was in the cast of the Popeye movie, doing a repetitive sight gag in the background while Robin Williams is singing. I mean this as an absolute compliment, I love that movie.😄
Bluto is in charge of Popeye! That's awesome
Yes! Love his DuckTales shirt, too.
the sailor MAN...get it right.😅
I used to speculate that Thomas Kincade was a serial arsonist who would paint the houses he set fire to because there is no way houses should glow like that unless there is an uncontrolled fire inside
coating a house in unevaporated paint would go up well I imagine, I think I have arson tendencies but do not seek to harm others so do not indulge. Watching stuff burn is hypnotising to me idk.
Rene Magritte had some paintings with daylight skies over nighttime buildings but it was supposed to be unsettling
In the example they show here of a late-afternoon winter scene, it looks like when people inside a house have just put new wiring in and are testing it by turning on as many lights and appliances at one time as possible, while one person in the basement waits by the fuse box with a flashlight in case any of the circuits break. It feels like that's the only plausible reason an interior would ever be that bright. It looks absolutely unbearable.
Art that is idealized is art ideologized. (Autocorrect wanted to change this to "idiologized", which works as well).
@kilgoreplumbus1360 everyone is hypnotized by fire...im glad you dont wanna hurt people tho
Thomas Kinkade - bringing untold comfort to a generation that tells everyone else to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
So apt.
To me, Kinkade art is like the Polar Express movie. There's a warmness to it but there's also something profoundly creepy and uncanny.
Omg! This! My MIL will go on and on about his work and my husband feels the same way (bc he generally adopts whatever she likes) and I just feel the inexplicable need to go take a shower.
Art that is idealized is also ideologized, and perhaps sanitized "for your protection". Kincaid would have hated Picasso's "Guernica", which is precisely why Guernica matters and Kincade does not. Now let's try to imagine what America would be like if 1 in 4 American homes had a print of Guernica on the wall..... By the way, I saw a triptych on display in a modern art museum in Barcelona that was sort of a combination of Guernica and a Dante-inspired, Hieronymus Bosch style, "7 levels of hell" painting. It was staggering, terrifying, and enormously powerful.
@@goodun2974wow I'm gonna look that up
@@goodun2974 Picasso was also an ass.
@@Foghorn-tr1je , this is true: sometimes the ever-popular "tortured artist" theme or meme turns out to be a not-so-popular *torturer-as-artist* or "artist as torturer" upon closer study or, ugh, personal experience and physical contact. I will say, however, that the Picasso museum in Barcelona is worth visiting, as is the Gaudi museum. Picasso's earliest work look nothing like his later cubist works.
My mom bought a piece of this dreck. She told me over and over how I need to keep it as an investment and only sell it if I had it appraised so I would get a good price. I stopped trying to tell her that it would never hang on my walls and it wasn't worth what she thought it was because it started to feel mean. She mentioned it again while she was in hospice and I promised to take good care of it. I hate that guy. I hate him even more that he's a part of my memories of my mom's passing.
Oh, what a sad, nightmarish thing to go through!
Hope you got her money back. 😂😢
If it's worth it... maybe try to think of it as she genuinely thought it would be helpful for you, and was trying to help you.
But fuck Kincaid.
The only thing Kinkade art is worth is taking them and painting over them with images from other genres, such as Star Wars, Bosch, Disney, orgies etc 🤣🤣🤣
Oh, your comment runs parallel with one of mine. And I, too, felt bad not being able to show the same enthusiasm for my mom’s $800 Kincade piece.
Getting to see Sophie deal with Robert in real time is my favorite thing. Sophie, you are truly producer goals!
sophie putting up with roberts shinanagins is 30% of why i listen
@@SgtKaneGunlock As a long time listener, having Sophie speak in the episodes definitely made the show better. Getting to see her facial reactions to Robert's shenanigans ups the content even more.
its too bad they were not filming during the bagel throwing days.
Randy looks like an unhinged and yet slightly more hinged version of Cody Johnston. Like his beard is a bigger mess but his soul seems more at peace.
the sentiment that cody johnson is defined by his soul being at odds with peace is such a fun summary i hope he never reads.
Excellent call
he’s like Cody and Big Joel did the fusion dance
@@austinsetser6081 OH GOD
Professional illustrator just dropping some insights on the industry:D Selling art to the middle class has actually been a big business for over a century, indeed in the early 20th century illustration was incredibly lucrative. In 1910 when the average American pay was $438 annually and average home price $2000, Maxfield Parrish raked in $100,000, making him one of the wealthiest individuals on Earth. (He was also an objectively better painter than Kinkade - freakishly so, as he painted his images in separate layers of red, blue, and yellow glazed, a technical marvel.) His painting "Daybreak" continues to outsell the Last Supper, and is estimated to be contained in 1 of 4 American homes. Other examples are Norman Rockwell, Margaret Keane, and J.C. Leyendecker. For my own part selling prints is essentially all I do, and I'll go on record emphatically that regular non-billionaire humans are by far the best customers:)
Norman Rockwell is one of the finest _storytellers_ in the world. I don't generally like what people consider his "genre" (wholesome small-town American life), but for him, I make an exception. Every detail, every _line_ in his paintings contributes to what Edgar Allen Poe called "the unity of the whole." I learned _sooo_ much about picture composition from just from looking at Rockwell paintings, it's unreal.
Maxfield Parrish's work is stunning, too. It's my dream to see some of his stuff in person; apparently, no print can really capture the power of the originals.
emus pedaling bicycles...global solidarity time a new method of time keeping that places both hemispheres spheres of globe Side by side counter rotating next to one another divided into twelve color coded sections subdivided into sixty numerical minutes...eliminating the need for inter national date line and daylight savings time saving an enormous amount of energy being spent correcting mistake that are made by clerks trying to understand why for several hours every day it is three different days on the same planet.
Everyone thinks of Norman Rockwell's work as kitschy Americana but later in his career he turned out some insightful stuff, like "The Problem We All Live With" and the Goya-esque "Murder in Mississippi."
Rockwell is a fascinating guy - I looked at Wikipedia to jog my memory and there was some stuff I forgot.
Maxifield Parrish is legitimately technically wonderful. Seeing his work in person is kind of mindblowing from a technical standpoint alone. Now those paintings are luminous - the layers are so, SO fine.
Parrish's work is so beautiful.
I hope you don't mind this question, do you have a recommendation for a place where you can have quality prints made? I've tried to have prints made in the past but the details didn't transfer well.
Thomas Kincaid is Lisa Frank for grandmas
Or doomsday cultists. Can't forget about them.
I regret to inform you that, thanks to the inexorable and stupid march of time, that Lisa Frank is Lisa Frank for grandmas.
@@frumiousbandersnatch😂
I think Kincaid paintings perfectly (and accidentally?)capture the feeling of uncanny valley. Like, they resembles real landscapes, but something about them is so fantastical that it feels fake. The closest I can muster, is that his paintings feel like hallucinations. They look like the world does while tripping on mushrooms, but.... more distant. Disconnected.
As a rural californian, the resemblance to almost real things and places really drive the feeling home
They are bloody dark paintings - they have profound psychological dark. Artificial, twee environments that literally (this has been studied) grow to depress those who look at these paintings too long (even when they like them). It's putrid garbage.
Kincaid paintings look like genAI art before that was a thing. If you told me that Midjourney shat that out, I'd believe it.
@@ValerieEnriquez1000% what I was thinking. All soft focus vibes with too many glow effects and really bad perspective. Exactly like something that AI shits out.
It's like a beauty filter turned one notch too high.
Like a song with just a bit too much autotune.
A bunch of making single parts prettier over and over again until they no longer fit together
@@AnkhAnanku I commented before hearing the part about how AI was probably fed a lot of Kincaid and that's why your aunt's/bot posts on Facebook look Like That and it just makes so much sense. Everyone's aunt post their Kincaids online, genAI scrapes and "learns" from it and eventually the AI gets trained on the stuff the prior AI made and now we're in the gray goo version of the internet. It's happening with large language models now.
I'm not trying to discredit BTB here, but i think we can all agree that the evilest painter was rejected from an Austrian art college and had some pretty disturbing thoughts about certain ethnic minorities.
I thought it was a French college?
Whatever. Delusions of artistic talent are common among megalomaniacs like Hitler and Putin. I'm sure that Trump thinks he's a great painter too.
I was thinking the same
I was just thinking that one of the similarities between the two is that Kinkade also rarely includes people in his paintings. I think that contributes to the eerie vibe they give off; suspiciously lifeless and somehow vaguely post-apocalyptic, like you don't know who or what is really lurking in that cabin.
Idk that is like calling Michael Schumacher a ski athlete.
I grew up in the same town as Thomas Kinkade. He was widely considered to be a drunken asshole, who turned his back on the town, his brother (who is also considered to be one of the Town drunks), his gallery was considered to be an eyesore, and it was generally accepted that the only reason I had money was because he did work for Disney because he was too much of an asshole, that if Disney hadn't gotten him, he won't be anybody
And to put it in perspective: this town made national headlines a few years ago for protesting the fact that they couldn't call themselves Hangtown, and Kincaid was considered to be an asshole even to them
@@ScaryClownProduction Well, I can kinda see that.
If you're going for Wild West tourism dollars, Hangtown is a MUCH cooler name than Placerville. And I suppose that the Placervillian Chamber of Commerce gets seriously annoyed by the huge traffic jam at the Rt 49/US 50 light every weekend - of people who don't stop and give them no business, but just get themselves to Lake Tahoe as fast as they can.
@@ScaryClownProduction I was at those protests!!!
@@Baribrotzer no it's because it's a right wing place and they got all upset because there are people who get upset by the idea of a noose (I'm not joking, there were quite a few quotes about snowflakes)
Can confirm this is all true: I'm from the same town. Remember him selling his stuff in front of Raley's when I was a teenager
My late Dad, a fairly talented amateur painter, would have described Kincaids work as "Chocolate Box Lid", it wasn't meant as a complement
A talented painter of words, too.
My aunt was the venerated artist of her small rural community. She generated income from her classes in "Thomas Kincade painting." Her "students" were all SNL-style church ladies. I remember her telling me that they weren't allowed to sign their paintings without the added phrase "in the style of Thomas Kincade." It's sad that she was actually quite talented on the rare occasions she would paint local landscapes, but she was a TK machine. I was astounded to learn he was born in 1958. I figured he was her era (pre-boomer).
There's an entire industry around "paint like Bob Ross". No joke. The owners of the Ross IP have certification courses teachers have to take. Then they book the certified teachers all over the country. I live in a major market, we have 6 certified teachers here.
@@CatMinionUS I am part of the problem because I am now googling Bob Ross painting class
I did not expect Randy to look like a Viking but here we are.
He looks like marx and Engels had a baby
Yer a wizard, Randy!
He's Trevor Phillips from GTA5
I’ve always pictured him as his character in his comics circa 2005
A viking in a DuckTales shirt, no less.
I see why Kincaid and Rockwell get compared. But honestly, when I look at even the more happy Rockwell paintings, I feel drawn in. It feels like he wants me to be part of the world he creates. While with Kinkade, it feels like he wants me to see it, to enjoy it, but that I'm not invited into it.
I really admire an artist who is willing to say "I just want people to be happy." I write erotica and my Twitter bio is literally "I write things that make people feel good." I'm proud of that.
But I think that a key difference is that Rockwell believes that making people feel good is just as valid of a goal for an artist as anything else, while Kinkeid seems to think that's the only purpose of art. And the result is him being worse at making people feel good, because he isn't really thinking about what to avoid, and what makes people not feel good. The lights in the houses are there because glowing is happy. It doesn't really account for the fact that sometimes glowing is off-putting. Or that two different things can make me smile, but for different reasons. He just puts things in a pile of "Happy" and "Not Happy" and jams as much happy as he can in.
When Rockwell wants you to smile, he approaches it with a question of "How do I bring out this feeling in the viewer?"
When Kinkayd does it, he comes at it with an approach of "What can I put in here that people will like?"
Because Rockwell is actually technically competent, there is thought put into it, he knew how to compose an image to tell a story, he is very good at visual storytelling.
Kinkaid is more shallow, he is just painting something that looks superficially pleasant.
Rockwell was also interested in using his art for social criticism, such as “The Problem We All Live With.” It shows a small Black girl (inspired by Ruby Bridges) being protected by federal marshals against segregationist protesters as she walks to kindergarten.
The scene is as carefully and symmetrically composed as any Renaissance Nativity, and the little girl’s appearance is detailed as warmly as any of his Saturday Evening Post covers… but the wall behind her shows racist slogans and smears from thrown tomatoes, reflecting actual reactions.
So Rockwell was not only the greater craftsman, but the far greater artist in terms of making a statement with his work.
Rockwell's art has humanity, both in a literal and figurative sense. Worts and all. Kincaid's is completely devoid all of that.
@@stannieholt8766 oh absolutely. I was specifically making the comparison purely within the context of the works that aren't trying to say something, because my point was about the fact that respecting the power of art enables you to accomplish the goal of making something light and happy.
If you see Rockwell's work in person, there's just no comparison. The colors, the strokes, the craftsmanship...
The best thing about video podcasts? The guests' cats!
And Robert's bathrobe
@@brucywarren That’s a kimono.
Thomas Kinkade was an artificially intelligent human trained to generate trapper-keeper covers for 80-year-old middle schoolers.
Genius!
That reminds me, I wonder if there will be a Behind the Bastards for Lisa Frank
I am delighted that I get to tell this story.
I used to go to a small fan-run Supernatural con for fanfic writers. The first year I went, they played a Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage drinking game. The rules were simple: the person who resisted drinking the longest-i.e., the last person to take their first drink-won.
I did not win.
Also, are you guys aware that Supernatural fanfic writers invented the Omegaverse?
@amandastraw6965 i unfortunately am but i have no clue if these fine folks are
Randy's got the "THE END IS NIGH" look on
Lol 😂
You can get some really good rewards from Randy's side quests, too, but you can only start the quest chain if he's coming up on a deadline.
Here I am being up my own bum:
Kinkade, The Painter of Light, because no one has heard of Rembrandt before.
It's the equivalent of a musician claiming to be the "composer of sound".
My thoughts were more along the lines of Monet, but yes! That trademarked moniker that he gave himself has always chapped my ass. My kids have derived quite a bit of amusement from people who have asked me to admire their Kincaide prints.
rem-brand-t even has burn and fire related in the name :P
@@henryglennon3864 - it's the equivalent of Joe Rogan calling himself the thinking person's intellectual.
Even among his contemporaries he would not fit the moniker, but dude was good at marketing.
I've already listened to the audio version on Spotify, but here I am--I came to see the pictures of the paintings, I stayed to follow the every movement of Randy's cat.
The funny thing about Kinkade's "highlighting" method of mass production, is that it's actually the inverse of how many old masters did it. Many Renaissance painters has an entire studii of "understudies" who would paint almost the entire portrait, often before a client had even been found. And the master would just come in and do the face, once the client showed up.
Artists have been figuring out ways to mass produce their stuff for ages. It's really only with the advent of lithography, photography and other industrial-scale reproduction methods, that fine-artists (and more specifically, their rich ass collectors) hit upon the notion that exclusivity is the key to art's worth. Much as I despise Warhol, I appreciate that he helped burst that notion.
Good lord, Kinkade invented AI art and NFTs! He really is history's greatest monster!
Thank you! The moment I sae AI art, I instantly knew it was as Kinkaide as Ive ever seen! 😂😂😂😂
What I find hilarious, is that Kincaide styled himself as the "painter of light" but it's James Gurney who is considered by artists to be incredible at painting light. He even has an incredibly well regarded book for artists called Color and Light.
I always think of artists like Dan Flavin, James Turrell and others as being “painters of light” personally. I mean they’re painting with light. All actual painters are just painting with sticky mud.
I mean, Monet... let's not even compare, it's insulting.
Kinkaids real talent seem to be knowing how to market himself.
Albert Bierstadt is the painter I most associate with light. I think he's literally the painter Kinkade wants to be, and can't reach because Kinkade is unwilling to try different things and is therefore incapable of making a creative decision.
I can think of many artists with excellent use of light. I wouldn't say James Gurney is "the one" I think he just made the best books on colour and light out there. (Also he's a super friendly dude! He painted me as a detail in one of his paintings heheh).
I've only ever heard Kincade being brought up in the context of marketing.
I've probably listened to all the episodes that Randy had been on, and finally matching the face to the voice is *jarring.*
At this point it's been like 20 years since I started reading Something Positive, but I never understood why he drew himself like that until just now.
Same, I'm blown away. Popeye is in good hands.
There's an appearance of "Grunkle" Stan Pines from Gravity Falls on a podcast the name of which I forget (It's Alex Hirsch just improvising in character) where he praises his favorite artist, who he refers to as "Thomas Kinkelly, Painter of Clowns". It's such a deep cut, but I think a lot about how much that single offhand joke really punches way above its weight for a non-canon quote from an animated Disney TV character. It's shockingly layered for what it is. Here's a stupendously corrupt, periodically actually criminal old man who runs a tourist trap filled with forged cryptid ephemera and merchandise casually conflating all this 20th Century American mega-kitsch in a way that somehow feels both very wrong and very believable at the same time. I remember actually googling "Thomas Kinkade clowns" as I was listening, because I knew he had the name wrong, but I also had this instinctive knowledge that came from somewhere I couldn't identify that what he was referring to appealed to the same AUDIENCE as Kinkade's paintings. And "Kinkelly" is such a perfect slice of "Old American guy who was always a POS but has now even started to get worse at just being a bullshit artist as senility slowly sets in" pie. Alex's delivery and how he elaborates on the subject just makes it even better, too - The way he uses that gruff, bourbon-soaked hector to wax nostalgic about how "Thomas Kinkelly" painted "Only the SADDEST of clowns!" perfectly captures that feeling of listening to someone whose very existence seems to erase that fine line between pure bullshit and the most guileless kind of sincerity, who fundamentally doesn't know the difference, in artistic terms, between being uncompromising and just being really, REALLY aggressively performative. That guy on tiktok with a "passion for acting" who only does out-of-context (save for the captions) scenes of people who are being broken up with or who just watched their own child die or something horrific screaming and crying and kicking things and falling on the ground comes to mind, and arguably that's the other side of the Kinkade coin, just using agony as a cheap signifier of artistic value instead of tranquilized nostalgia. As the types of AI images discussed in this podcast demonstrate, the two often go hand in hand. It's all about that performatively protective and concerned but actually completely emotionally and intellectually stunted type of middle-aged middle-American person that watches TLC, the Hallmark channel and nothing else whenever they're not on Facebook sharing MAGA memes and images of AI Jesuses that glow like halogen lamps kissing starving African babies until they're healthy again and can suddenly fly or whatever. It bears repeating: MILLIONS of people unironically consume this shit ALL DAY now.
This is...quite possibly the most entertaining short essay on pop culture I've read in years. Bravo.
@@ShinyAvalon Thanks, now I'm too pleased with myself to sleep....
Update: I was out for like maybe an hour, but that was it. You made my night. Thank you again.
If you recall the podcast ylease let me know, I'm both a big fan of Gravity Falls and a big hater of Thomas Kincaid (Not just for having the same name lol)
Holy crap, this was a fascinating read. I only wish it had even a single line break to make it easier on the eyes, but damn if I wouldn't listen to more rants like this in video essay form.
As someone who used to work for a Thomas Kinkade adjacent gallery….i have a unique hatred for his work. Mainly because of the clientele it would attract. I’ve got stories. It’s truly amazing what sort of absolute homophobic, racist, sexist bullshit old white people feel comfortable sharing with a complete stranger as they stare at the absurdly religious work. Meanwhile I just stood there listening like…..ok so you wanna buy it or…..????? lol i was there far too long and I’m happy to say I am a full time freelance artist now and my mental health has never been better
You have the same qualities as those whom you deride.
As someone who grew up around these, I apreciate the internet retroactively justifying my seemingly irrational hatred of these paintings.
stethoscope...stethophone...intellectual decay. global solidarity time, a new method of time notation that places both hemispheres of globe side by side counter rotating divided into twelve color coded sections subdivided into sixty minutes eliminating the need for both international dateline and daylight savings time. preventing multitudinous clerical errors, as petty government clerks attempt to understand why for several hours every day it is three different days at the same time
@@cactusshadow9840 Gene Ray taking on daylight savings time?
Ironic choice of username
@@MiyukiFan I'm fully aware lol, I've thought it was a funny coincidence for a long time
I've enjoyed hearing from Randy's perspective on the pod ever since the Scott Adams episodes. Great guest on a great podcast.
damn randy is transition goals
I LOVE this comment xx
If you wanna transition into a cabin in the most remote parts of Montana, I suppose.
BIG AGREE lolol
@@ferlessleedr precisely
Hell yeah getcha goals live your best life
I worked illegally at age 13 at a Kinade store in my local mall for Christmas. Got paid in cash every dsy I worked. Thry tried to short me, but my mom and I threatened to expose them using under age labour.
Cant enter an Evangelical’s home without spotting at least one Kinkade print, if not in the dining room, then a small one in bathroom
Of course. As servants of the Gnostic Archon, Evangelicals are naturally drawn to these vortices of evil energy
In my family it was jigsaw puzzles of his paintings that had been framed after they were completed
@@jawsbert
Wow, that’s even more cringe 😬
@@jawsbert Or paint by numbers.
Bathroom, perfect placement
I am so excited for this one. I was raised by my very religious grandparents and my grandma was a HUGE Kinkade stan. She had so many of his prints and for one of our family vacations we visited Carmel just to look at the architecture.
What happened to it all?
@@ostrich67 She probably still has everything, sadly I had to go low contact with them.
As an artist whose medium is wood carving, I get hit up with wood carving ai. And there is this kinkade shine to the ai that just isn't the same with wood (yes even with a glossy coat of lacquer it just not the same) and the wood grains just don't match up. It's never ending and I hate it. And someone was fooled and shared an ai photo to a wood carving group wood carving illustrated magazine
Although on another wood carving group, a chip carver took one of those ai photos and decided to see how she would actually chip carve the image. Hers is more real and just beautiful. It highlights why these ai artists bots destroy the attention of what real artists should get
I told a woman working in a gallery in Monterey who was excitedly telling me about his work having hidden crosses, that I found his art creepy and disturbing. I said it felt like it sucked the light from a room.
She got so upset with me that I thought she was going to start crying.
I've never met a T.K. fan who wasn't a bit rabid about it.
At one point is was hidden N's for Nanette
I love that you have that Logitech submarine controller in your layout.
One time someone donated a ton of "collectable" plates to my job. In the boxes, I found a letter from some New York auction company or something, to who I presume was the mother or grandmother of the folks who donated the stuff. The letter was explaining to the woman that the plates were an investment, and she would be able to both retire and put her grandkids through college off the sale of them after only a few decades of waiting.... Considering her grandkids gave the things away, I think that was a scam...
I remember things like that having tear-out cards in Oriental Express, and you mailed them in with a check to order. christ, I knew when I was *8* those promos were full of shit. it's baffling that anyone ever believed this mass-produced junk with invisible "artists" would increase in value.
This is actually upsetting me. What truly despicable practices
There is one artist who has modeled himself after Kinkade rather successfully, and that is Wyland. I worked at one of his galleries and hated every second of lying to people about the “collectible value” of a shitty print reproduced by the thousands. He is also equally a terrible human being masquerading as an environmentalist and I have a theory about him using a ghost painter who has since died. I am convinced that I am right and tell everyone who will listen. The only genuine thing about Wyland is that he is a hack.
I had to look him up. His art seems like something made for postcards or jigsaw puzzles
WYLAND!!!! **primal scream** He had a gallery next door to the bookshop I worked at during the early 90s. He was a stuckup asshole and his art was garbage. I don’t know how he persuaded the City of Long Beach to deface our Civics Center downtown, but he did. Inaccurate mural of sea creatures. If kids in Long Beach have a faulty understanding of oceanography, Wyland is to blame.
yes its pretty good but nothing spectacular.
the perspective in the first picture seems off. the cottage seems too close and the red truck seems to tiny
I have them listen to BTB for years and this is my first time seeing any of these people. This must have been what it felt like to see a radio host on TV for the first time. Wild
the more I watch this podcast, the more I realize that Sophie's job is literally just Robert Wrangler. She wrangles Roberts, and she's damn good at it too!
I've hated Kincade ever since my high school art class. I'm feeling really justified in despising him now.
Why does Sophie keep defending Jamie Loftus, the Grand Rapids hammer assassin? What is she hiding from us? And why isn't Anderson on camera?
*Alleged* hammer assassin. The case never went to trial because of, y'know... what happened to all of those Assistant District Attorneys.
If only the failed Austrian painter had gone down this path. It still a dark road, but nowhere near as dark as what happened in our timeline.
When Ralph Bakshi gets mentioned I'm all in on this episode. Hopping into the backseat with a loaded pistol, sunglasses and a lit cigarello. "Let's roll!"
Of Bakshi, Dan Olsen (of Folding Ideas) said "Let me tell you the story of a coked-out pervert from New Jersey and his dream to make a movie."
yeah, that was a fun surprise
It's funny this popped up in my feed, recently I was thinking about getting old paintings like this and then painting strange somewhat apocalyptic scenes on them.
He reminds me of Big/Little Joel.
They already kind of feel eerie and purgatorial; what with the serine depopulated snowy landscapes dotted with twee cottages who’s windows reveal interiors being consumed by eternal raging infernos.
Thomas Kinkade looks closer to 2024 Steven Seagal than 2007 Jared Padalecki
Dude a Thomas Kincade biopic starring Steven Segal would be amazing. Especially if he wrote and directed it.
@@theautisticguitarist7560 hilarious. A con artist writing and starring as a con artist
I have been reading Randy's webcomic for *ages* and I never looked him up. He looks exactly how I mentally pictured him, though. And I cannot overstate how much I love it.
I hate, HATE the title "painter of light." His sense of light was crap. The light in his paintings makes no sense.
You were supposed to be able to shine whatever light on them and "affect the time of day depicted" according to whoever worked in that galleria I encountered in 2001.
I first learned about Thomas Kinkade in a Southern Baptist Sunday School class. Our lessons were...loosely inspired by a devotional-type book chock full of Thomas Kinkade paintings. I say loosely inspired because no matter where we started, the lesson always ended with "and that's why communism is evil and Jesus is a Republican."
I took a long-suffering boyfriend with me to one class. Afterwards, all I remember him saying was, "Thomas Kinkade is a very weird choice for a bible study book. He was not a nice man." (He graciously did not mention the 600 additional weird choices made during the class, which I think was very polite of him.)
"I was doing a Supernatural fandom joke." I feel seen, Robert. Thank you.
Came for the Kinkade shit-talk, stayed for the continuous mispronunciation of Placer-- excuse me-- PLAYcerville!🤣Still, with his "Hometown Gallery" in Pville finally going under, it's heartening to hear him get kicked around one last time!
As a Sacramento native and professional Californian, Joan Didion would surely have known it’s pronounced “PLASS-er-ville.” (Named after a type of gold mine, derived from the Spanish word “placer.”)
You know, going in, that Robert is going to pronounce things wrong, but sometimes they just hit different
Ah! new around these parts so I didn't! Video's a hoot though, so looking forward to further mispronunciation.
I've always described Thomas Kinkaide's art as "if a lich or some ither soulless creature hit their mid unlife crisis and became an art forger who specializes in knocking off Manet and Rockwell and oftwn gets them mixed up in his cephalion.
The discussion about what makes good art is always very interesting. For me, good art should evoke a reaction in the viewer. Whether you want to make people happy, or angry or horny or depressed, it all serves a purpose. Art is a form of communication, and that communication can be as subtle as enhancing the ambiance of a hospital waiting room or as loud and devastating as war journalist photography.
I’m going to be honest: I’m fascinated by Thomas Kinkade discourse. Because, for the life of me, I don’t know why people hate his paintings so much. They are the most inoffensive art pieces ever created, and yet people react with absolute revulsion to them. And I can’t wrap my head around the reason why. I can understand being offended by art meant to be offensive, but to be offended by something that’s otherwise mid and inoffensive…again, that fascinates me. Why are people so offended over things that are not offensive?
Because art never occurs in a vacuum; it is the cultural aspect of it that fuels its offensiveness.
That someone sells kitsch is cringy but it’s offensive when it explodes and is treated as if it’s qualitative equal to, say, Andrew Wyeth. It doesn’t help that it became associated with an odious group of religious people-Evangelicals-which is offensive to many.
@@SummalogicaeImagine saying that about Muslims or Jews. Are they odious and offensive too? Bigotry is ugly no matter who you direct it at.
I think it has to do with the hypocrisy of it all. The paintings try SO hard to seem inoffensive, while also representing politically charged ideas that have brought so much suffering into the world. Every piece screams the ~American Dream~ but to anyone who knows their history, there's this inescapable feeling that in each picturesque cabin, a fire is burning and buried underneath it is a field of indigenous bones. They look so peaceful and yet the taste of blood fills your mouth if you look at one too long
Real talk the sailing thing is the same as my dad. He bought a sailboat and wanted to sail across lake eerie and down the mississippi for 6 months. He had to be rescued on day 2.
As an amateur artist who's also a mechanical engineer with an interest in rocketry, i can only hope to strive to be a good future subject for BtB.
So deny you entry to art school and then vote you into office
With some hard work you can get there eventually buddy. Don’t give up!
Maybe a Failure to Launch crossover with BtB
You should strive to be a future subject of magpie's show.
kinkade is to luminism what rowling is to fantasy
Best part of this format is seeing the Lagavulin on Robert's shelf.
Really appreciate Robert's occasional (along with certain guests) nods to roleplaying games, even if many of them are (justifiably) disdainful. I feel represented.
I always heard the title, "Painter of Light", and thought how Lucifer means "Bearer of Light". So Thomas Kinkaide was comparing himself to Lucifer
Thank you for this message.i'm 47yrs old $75,000 biweekly and I'm retired, this video have inspired me greatly in many ways!!!!❤❤ I love this podcast!
@@Jessy46454It's Christina Ann Tucker doing she's changed my life. A BROKER- like her is what you need.
Wow 😱 I know her too
Miss Christina Ann Tucker is a remarkable individual who has brought immense positivity and inspiration into my life.
I started with a miserly $1500. The results have been mind blowing I must say TBH
I know that woman (Christina Ann Tucker)
If you were born and raised in new York you'd know too, she's my family's Broker for 3yrs till now and a very good one if you asked me. No doubt she is the one that helped you get where you are!!!!
@@maxicorreoHow do I get connection to this woman you speak about!!?
If you insist on doing episodes on artists with Randy Milholland as guest, then I'm going to want more episodes on artists.
I second this
“ROBERT!!!”
-Sophie, usually
Those cabins lit like they have Marcellus Wallace's soul in them.
Kinkade believing that art can only be valid if it makes you feel good illuminates a lot about his character. He definitely wouldn't have appreciated something like the game Pathologic, which encapsulates pain and misery beautifully as you attempt to thwart a burgeoning epidemic whilst navigating the strange and esoteric governing processes of the town around you.
*second most evilest painter
Yeah, Caravaggio
@@BNardolilli ok third most
most evilest *successful painter.
Okay, but I would genuinely wanna see you guys do John K of Ren and Stimpy, 'cause holy shit.
Sad alcoholic control freak with daddy issues grooms teenage girls, burns friendships
That would be a great episode. Total train wreck of a human being
Proud owner of a Randy Milholland print. Medusa and a blindfolded bird. It is my retirement fund.
AI art being trained on a rightwing American artist makes a lot of sense, lol. (I'm aware it takes literally millions or billions of images to train gen AI and so a single artist can't have that much impact, but it's still funny to see the link between rightwing shit heads of yesteryear and the techbros of today.)
this has very little to do directly with the content of the episode, but "Thomas Kinkade" sounds like the sort of name I'd expect a villain in Bioshock to have
Ugh, my Aunt had a Kincaide. It was a Xmas gift from her daughter & it had actual lights O_o
A couple of my college art teachers in the 90s had gone to school with Kincaide. They didn't really think much of his art but they admired his success. If you wanted a job at Disney/Pixar/Hallmark/WB etc you went to Academy of Art SF or to Art Center Pasadena. I didn't know Kincaide was from Placerville until I watched that Jared Padalecki Hallmark movie lol.
if anyone wants some truly cursed knowledge... there might be furry supernatural art, but omegaverse also came from the fandom. It was actually RPF about the main actors. I was not expecting to share this, but I also wasn't expecting Robert to name drop supernatural
Maybe I'm remembering a fever dream but I swear Robert has made reference to mpreg in the past
Welp, today I learned I grew up with a Kincade painting in my childhood home in the living room. I can’t unlearn that, thanks Robert
24:48 as somebody who has watched both Supernatural and Gilmore Girls I agree with both Robert and Sophie here.
Not to be a pedant- it's *Boris* Vallejo, not Bruce. Also, Gerry Conway created the Punisher!
I want Jamie loftus to have to do her own 16th minute podcast on the Grand Rapids murders. We need to make it happen!
I worked in an office where the manager had Thomas Kincaid paintings decorating the whole office. At least a dozen large paintings. I didn’t know who Kincaid was but noticed that the nicely framed prints had a Focus on the Family emblem at the bottom. I didn’t know the artist but I knew Focus on the Family and I had to look at look at those prints Constantly. The boss was a fundie so it wasn’t a great place to work. 😂
Suggestion: while you're discussing something visual can you keep it up on screen? Was frustrated while watching because I wanted to look at the image and instead I got to watch a talking head describing it.
Love your podcast by the way, thanks!
41:31 if I ever have a band, the name of the first album is going to be "Enraged at an Early Age"
AN ANIMAL ENRAGED AT AN EARLY AGE
'CAUSE HOW THE FUCK YOU S'POSED TO GROW UP WHEN YOU WEREN'T RAISED?
SO AS I GOT OLD AND I GOT A LOT TALLER
MY DICK GOT SMALLER BUT MY BALLS GOT LARGER
I DRINK MORE LIQUOR TO F
Now that I have established my bonafides with my knowledge about the great Supernatural fandom (I was a Cas fan), I can confess that my mom owns 2 Kincaids. I bought them for her 😬. I knew it was scammy but she loved his work, and I love her.
So who else out there has a relative that upon discovering they collected Kincaid paintings, proudly displayed in their home... your respect level for them, which was never high in the first place, plummeted to the bottom.
Yup, the house I grew up in. My parents were super religious
My mother in law. To be honest my opinion of her couldn't have been lower. Every book in her house (all 23 of them) I counted them twice. Except for one Bible the rest were all goofy woo self help books. Tony Robbins to Deepak. Even her religion is surface level and full of bigotry.
Well, for my mom it wasn't Kinkade (thank God!) but the Precious Moments figures 🤮 She had a large display case for her collection ... Precious Moments $h1t is such a scam!
They probably only counted professional painters, and a certain someone never quite made it to that stage. Hence his "other job".
ok and you are so much better.... maybe your relatives 5hought the same about you. to me lots of self help stuff is a sign of searching for direction and peace.
As someone who also lived in Redding for a while, the way Robert mispronounces Placerville over and over again drives me batty. 😂
I love the discussion about "pleasant" art. It's not really a surprise that Kinkade ended up essentially running an assembly line factory, because that "pleasant" is really just the absence of any sort of feeling, like joy or sadness. Kinkade's paintings are like a dull morphine haze. At some point, an actual human artist might insert a point of view or an emotion into the painting, but that might be controversial or confusing, and therefore harder to sell.
I’m loving the video pods! It’s so crazy to see the people in my ears on screen. Fabulous, y’all.
Great video! Glad to see deep dives on artists like this. I think it's an interesting thread for someone to make a video linking Kinkade and AI Art.
One correction, though, is that there are other living artists who make more than Kinkade, including Jeff Koons. At least, I think so. You said he died with $70 Million, but Jeff Koons has a Net Worth of $400 Million, and, while also hated in the art world, is still more respected than Kinkade. But, I guess you could say Kinkade is more of a whole global industry, and that industry may be worth Billions, or something.
I remember commercials for those "Kinkade Galleries" prints. The thing that made me really remember it was the term "master highlighters". I think there was another marketeers doing this called "The Hommel Mint" and a third place using the same marketing pitches and even the same narrator was selling mail order Precious Moments figurines.
I love Randy, and man, he could definitely come back on for like, at least a dozen more subjects.
More Randy please ! I've been reading SP for 15-20 years and somehow he is as sweet as I would have expected the creator of Rippy the Razor to be. Lots of love to you from France, hope your move to California went well.
Awesome that they got Rasputin for this episode
been listening to this podcast for years and honestly video versions are worth it if only for the pet guest appearances
I have never been more primed to hate an artist more than Kinkade lets f'n do this
Video means we get to see the kitty!
Oh MY GOD!!! I can't believe it. I LOVE listening to y'all, my twin boys turned me on to you guys. They started listening their first year of college. They've learned so much as have I. I've always wanted to thank you. Even though sometimes it can get too much dark, we always go back.
And my husband and I LO O OVE when Sophie truly laughs. It's so infectious!
Keep up the good work, the world needs it.
Some of my fave episodes are part 5 of Henry Kissinger, and the whole RFK jr series!
I started this episode with audio only. I imagined Randy to be extremely clean cut. Whoa
i like the Kinkade painting with Godzilla added
I haven't listen to the whole thing, so I don't know if this comes up, or if it is even known, but one of his daughters while in art school (in San Fran?) absolutely stole designs from online sellers on Etsy and pawned them off on her own site. She was called out and did the perfunctory mea culpas to not be expelled.