Thomas Kincade Dead (finally)

[marions ghost]

132. Get real

Kinkade is a very polarizing public figure. We owe nothing to his family. Kinkade owes something to the families he scammed, but I doubt his surviving family will be very generous to the people he skunked.

Warm and fuzzy sells and that is OK. I only wish real life were like a Christmas card. But you don't pay thousands for a Christmas card and you don't think of it as an investment. People paid thousands for his paintings.

The syrupy images--you shouldn't have to apologize for liking those. The issue is HOW he inflated the prices and sold them as originals, and how he became a sort of god-like figure. It was a cult, really. Nobody who bought a Kinkade had ever learned anything from The Wizard of Oz...

At least if you bought a piece of land in a Florida swamp, you have a piece of land in a Florida swamp. Buying a Kinkade is a worse investment. You have a piece of canvas with a generic unoriginal picture stamped on it by a factory. It is the lie that it is the same as, say, the art of Norman Rockwell, that is the problem. Rockwell was an artist, Kinkade was a factory owner.