It was with tremendous sadness that I heard this weekend of the passing of a dear friend of mine, dealer and gallerist Bonni Benrubi. The New York art world has lost a passionate voice. Legions of collectors have lost quixotic counsel. Several of us have lost a loyal friend. The void she leaves won’t easily, if ever, be filled.
Bonni’s unapologetic nature was her calling card. She didn’t suffer fools easily. There was no ingratiating charm hurled at some loafer wearing whale at an art fair. Not to say that she didn’t have charm. Quite the opposite. She had it in spades. But when she smiled, she meant it. If she gave you a hug, you knew you earned it.
In the Nineties, I loved going to her space on the upper east side in a brownstone a block or so away from the Whitney Museum. There, I saw excellent shows, was introduced to artists I had never heard of and always had a chance to kibitz either about the art world in general or art in specific. She was always generous with her time, perhaps because she loved the art of the art and not only the art of the deal. I felt the same way. Her manner was honest, funny and forthright. If she didn’t like something, she’d say so but she’d tell you why as well. The back room was always cacophonous. Portfolios staked high. A salon style sampling on the wall. Her environment, like her taste, omnivorous.
My love for photography may have been planted by my parents who in their infinite wisdom or naïveté would gamely hand me their camera to snap a picture or two. My acumen about the history of photography was nurtured at college and later by endless volumes of magazines and books. But my appreciation for curatorial authorship in the professional world of photo galleries I lay at Bonni’s door. For a taste of her curatorial eye one need only Google Image search her name. There, on the first page, you will only find one image of her and the rest are images of the artists and prints that she championed over the years. Matthew Pillsbury, Abe Morrell, and Massimo Vitali are here. Karine Laval, Linda McCartney and Gillian Laub are also here. Diverse to be sure but the red thread seems to be an empathic intelligence, with not a small trace of humor. And there you have it, that was Bonni Benrubi in a nutshell.
Google Image Search for Bonni Benrubi
Countless denizens of the New York and International art worlds will miss her. My heart goes out to her husband and two kids whom she loved very much and to the artists who were always an extended family as well.
-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, December 3rd, 2012
Here’s a link to a lovely and stiring piece in the NYT Blog
If you have memories of Bonni, I’d love to hear them. Please share them with a comment.
My earliest memories of going to the movies are in a theater in Southampton, NY where I grew up. A couple of memories stand out which include Around the World in 80 Days and Song of the South. The former upset me terribly for there was a scene of a funereal pyre. My mother introduced me to the concept that not everything that I saw on screen really happened and that the actors didn’t really die. The fine delineation between fact and fiction. Song of the South of course delighted me and to this day I can sing Zippa- Doo-Dah with the best of them. The essential quality of humability! The composer Steven Sondheim said it best, “Familiarity breeds content.” As I write this, memories of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Willy Wonka and the Chocalate Factory, Doctor Doolittle and Fantasia are also evocatively triggered.
The thing about those early memories though that fascinates me most is that my mother never chose a specific screening. We just went, bought our tickets and sat down whenever we arrived. We’d sit through, say, the last third of the movie, remain seated as the lights went up, people exited and entered and then as the house lights dimmed again proceeded to enjoy the first two thirds of the film. When we reached the point where we entered we simply got up and left feeling satisfied at having seen the full film. Later in my young teens, I remember doing this often when going to the Regency Theater on Broadway by myself at matinees. The mysteries of starting viewing a film, 60% after it began, are inurmerable. The film actually presents many more questions initially and only through patience are answers procured. Not understanding everything never phased me, in fact I guess the expectation of “knowing” never got planted in the first place. My mother’s early introduction of discontinuous narrative may have been vital to my pleasure of not knowing.
Art by in large doesn’t spell things out. I might posit that really good art lures you in with a “not knowing.” Two things are then essential to experiencing art: One is patience and the second is pragmatism. Patience is essential since narrative and aesthetic paydays can be attained long after the initial encounter. Pragmatism is the other cog since not everything will payoff. The pleasures of the Patience/Pragmatism polarity paradigm are also rooted in a suspension of disbelief. You have to release the desire for immediate gratification and trust (have faith) that some possible future epiphany lays in wait, like Tigger about to pounce.
Above all else, the equation stands clear: Seeing(Art)=Potential(Pleasure) or Potential(Insight) The converse is more concrete: Seeing(Art)=Barren(Landscape/Emotions) It is with these thoughts that I enter a new cultural season of exhibitions, screenings and aesthetic sniffing. Come sniff with me.
-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, October 2nd, 2012
Postscript: These ruminations were ignited by another two hour viewing of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, the 24 hour masterpiece of filmic collage. I’ve now seen just under six hours and I’m simply addicted. To read my thoughts about the film please see my post from earlier this year.
Around the World in 80 Days
You are reading these words.
There, you’ve gone and done it! Your eyes scanned each word of a concise five-word sentence, assembled meaning from subject, object and verb and simultaneously made it come true. The sentence will be equally true for the next person who reads it. But it wasn’t true before you dialed in this page. So the act of reading that sentence births the veracity of content.
Lest you think I’m going all Donald Barthleme on you, I’m setting you up for the paradigms of linguistic calisthenics with which you might best appreciate the extraordinary work of Ed Ruscha.
Reading Ed Ruscha opened on July 7th at the KunstHaus Bregenz and will remain on view through the summer and into a part of the fall. In three distinct floors, the exhibition traces Ruscha’s use of language, redaction, typography, the palindrome, and his use of the Book as both medium and subject. The title of the exhibition is apt. Reading paintings, both visually and verbally, is what one does with Ruscha’s work. But reading is only the beginning of the aesthetic experience.
Language
When tasting wine, you’re supposed to swirl the wine in your mouth, inhale to oxygenate the flavors. Tastes come in initial impressions, undertones and finishes. There is also the distinction between aroma and taste, which can work both in contrast and harmony to one another.
Ed Ruscha
Manual, 2002
Acrylic and ink on raw linen
60,9 x 50,8 cm
Photo: Paul Ruscha
© Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha’s visual use of language can best be framed in these vintner paradigms. There is direct content that is immediately evident: A painting of a book with the single word “Manual” on the cover. Concrete meaning if you will. Often there are undertones of wit and humor: the word Manual can naturally take the form of an instruction/reference tome but it comes with its equally evocative mirror doppelgänger of “automatic.” In a digital age, there is something distinctly analogue to a Manual. These double entendres and grammatical complexities alter meaning and add to a perhaps more resonant appreciation of Ruscha’s artistic paradigms. For instance, invest some more thought and one may arrive at manual labor, which Ruscha embraces. The painting is made by the artist’s hand and the charm of an almost trompe d’oeile depiction of a book is made even more intoxicating by its organic hand rendered methodology.
And here’s the most fascinating aspect: These intellectual investigations are not immediately necessary to appreciate or understand the work. There’s a matter-of-factness to the painting that doesn’t demand anything other than its objectness. While intellectual investment may yield greater pleasures, it doesn’t negate the simple purity of the image. This allows for an art that is simultaneously democratic and distinctly elite. No mean feat that!
Redaction
Introduced, I believe, with the Cityscapes series of the mid 90’s, Ruscha has used the shape of words and phrases and their placement on a plane as stand-ins for the meaning. 
The best incarnation of this particular paradigm is when these shapes are made by gently applying bleach to the linen cover of a vintage book. They are, however equally evocative when executed in a dry brush technique on linen. I have always seen this series and technique as an allusion to redaction, the onerous deleting of text by government censors wishing to keep sensitive materials from the public gaze.
Two examples of redacted documents. Left from a document from the CIA and right: a document pertaining to federal loan guarantees for nuclear construction in Georgia.
(This is quite different from the strike through option in digital typography, which allows the reader to understand the meaning of a sentence while simultaneously acknowledging that the publisher means to have it withdrawn. I rather abhor blogs who use this technique for snarky comments while trying to remain aloof.)
The use of bleach furthermore changes the feel significantly as it places it square in an act of erasure and not blacking out. Lost memory and fading inks are also alluded to.
Ed Ruscha
Give Up The Gold Or Give Up Your Life, 1999
Bleach on linen-covered board
50,8 x 40,6 cm
Photo: Paul Ruscha
© Ed Ruscha
Ruscha’s use of this compositional trope highlights the cadence of the phrase in size and placement. The artist always supplies the content in the title of the work thus the act of reading is twofold: 1.) the title has to be read, and 2.) the viewers gaze then places each word in the bleached spaces allotted. The viewer becomes an essential cog in the wheel of aesthetic completion. It also brings to mind scansion, the study of beat and meter in poetry. Scansion is the discipline that defines iambic pentameter as a line with ten syllables of five pairings of unstressed/stressed units (feet.) A fine example would be a line from John Keats’ Ode to Autumn “To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells.” Poetry is everywhere for Ruscha but rather than tap the literary lions, Ruscha hears the poetry in lines from Westerns and Film Noir: “Give Up The Gold Or Give Up Your Life.” The quote, or mere evocation places the work in a contemporary context. Poetic paradigms like alliteration can also be handily applied when listening to Ruscha’s chosen phrases like “Lion in Oil” and countless other examples. Alliteration and onomatopoeia in Ruscha’s work could easily be a doctoral thesis in and of itself.
Left: Ed Ruscha
In God We Trust,
Acrylic on Raw Linen
Right: The American Penny circa 2010
Linguistic content can also be obliquely political like in “In God We Trust” where Ruscha places the phrase in the circumference of a circle, which quickly becomes the text on the face of a penny in one’s memory. Politics, money, history and religion in a swift and economical gesture! The exhibition basically acts like intellectual dominoes. The more you savor, the more allusions cascade around you.
Books
The first floor of the Bregenz exhibition contains several vitrines containing the entire output of Ruscha’s extensive book publishing. These are not monographs but rather quixotic visual conceptual books that gather images and present them as art works in and unto themselves. Rather than affecting a public library presentational coldness to the proceedings the exhibition has struck upon a wonderful alternative. 
Each book is represented by an Ipad version and said tablets jut out from the vitrines offering the viewers a chance to swipe your fingers and scan the contents of each precious intimate tomb. (There’s nothing that I want more than to have Ruscha’s entire art book oeuvre on the digital shelves of my Ibook App. I’ll inquire if this might be forthcoming and keep my TruffleHunters posted.)
Ed Ruscha
Reading Ed Ruscha (Installation View of On The Road)
Installation view 1st floor,
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Photo: Markus Tretter
© Ed Ruscha, Kunsthaus Bregenz
An impressive volume of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, illustrated and designed by Ruscha, is also on display-encased in a vitrine and individually framed pages covering an entire wall. I mentioned this book and series in a previous post when I first saw it at the Hammer Museum last year. The book is wonderful and Ruscha’s “illustrations” are pitch perfect. I find them especially good because they work on an evocative level rather than an illustrational one. There’s also a wonderful inversion of chronology at work. Ruscha’s objects make Kerouac’s writing seem extremely relevant and contemporary while Kerouac’s writing makes Ruscha’s images and selections vintage. Seldom does one see a pairing that is so mutually beneficial and complementary.
In Ruscha’s able hands the book becomes a filmic medium taking each reader on a journey. The visual book is one of the few mediums that collect several images as a unit. Turn a page, the next image is revealed while the previous image is cloaked. Sequence affords a journey. With Ruscha, narrative development is often undermined with a surrealistic flourish of the unexpected. Each book offers such a path and to look at Ruscha’s career in total, the same can be said for his imagistic trajectory. The Bregenz exhibition bears this observation out handsomely. Bodies of work that may appear dissonant or unexpected at first, fit into an umbrella paradigm effortlessly when seen as the artist’s entire oeuvre. It seems to me that Ruscha is as good as he is because he practices a creative “both/and” generosity rather than a dogmatic “either/or” paradigm.
Typography
Most, but certainly not all, of Ruscha’s verbal/visual work is executed in a type style that the artist describes as “boy scout utility modern.” A free font version is available as Tapeworm, the name being a derivation of a sign making technique of using masking tape. It’s as declarative and non-emotive as a lot of the content Ruscha traffics in. Perhaps the most stunning deviation is Ruscha’s introduction of a topsy-turvy typography in the execution of a painting/book pairing “Stock Market Technique Number One.”
Ed Ruscha, Stock Market Technique Number One, 2002, Acrylic on Linen with Book, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
The original book is framed at the bottom right of the painting. The title on the original is a rather bland serif rendition but content dictates a different interpretation in Ruscha’s faux book painting. This contrast is sly. The editorializing of content happens solely in the use of what can only be described as a Chubby Checker font. I bring this up as simply another example of the fact that every choice on display is intentional and thus has the potential for content. The onion-like layers insist on pealing.
The Palindrome
Lastly, Ruscha’s fascination with language and visual punditry is on display with his quixotic use of the palindrome. For those unfamiliar with the term, a palindrome is simply a word, sentence or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards.
Racecar and Madam are wonderful individual word examples and my personal favorite phrase has always been “Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?” But least you think Ruscha merely uses this visual word play as an end itself, Ruscha couples this visual/linguistic complexity with another visual cousin to the Palindrome.
Bookmatching veneers for a Stratocaster Guitar!
Bookmatching is a term I first encountered in seeing wood veneer being manufactured in Indiana. The grain of the wood creates a rhythm when flipped and matched. To demonstrate, if a grain reads from left to right ABCD to create a longer pleasing pattern you flip the next slice and abut it to the first. This creates a visual pattern that reads ABCDDCBA and so on. The Rorschach inkblot is another visual example if you will. This fits deftly into the aforementioned allusion to scansion as well.
Ed Ruscha
Tulsa Slut, 2002
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
161,3 x 182,9 cm
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and Committee
© 2012. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Ruscha uses the palindrome as the verbal equivalent of bookmatching. “Tulsa Slut” fuses the two. In “Tulsa Slut” the words are painted on a large canvas that bears the double, book matched image of a snowy mountaintop. The double image then also becomes the two halves of an open book. Lastly, this mirroring is also a referent to the wonders of the human body, which bears the same twoness: eyes, ears, ovaries, lungs, kidneys, testicles and breasts all come in pairs. It’s all there, if one cares to read it.
Having your cake and reading it too.
I spent three hours at the exhibition, dividing my time almost perfectly one hour per floor. If the exhibit were in my hometown, I could see making weekly visits to have the works reveal more magic with each subsequent reading. For every visual and linguistic epiphany I managed to share in this post there are probably a dozen more that lie in wait. I can only hope that the exhibition travels to other institutions. I don’t believe this is the case right now.
Installation View of Reading Ed Ruscha
Photo: MM Muller
Thoughtfully curated and installed with grace and restraint, Reading Ed Ruscha is a delight. The exhibition further proves that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are pleasurable to be sure, but boy howdy, the assembled oeuvre really impresses.
Reading Ed Ruscha continues at the KunstHaus Bregenz through October 14th, 2012
-Mario M. Muller, Bregenz, Austria
Final European post forthcoming in a couple of weeks.
Life imitates Art is an ongoing series of personal encounters with objects, people and landscape which an artist has so authentically captured in their own work as to own the subject matter beyond the veracity of the prima facie experience. Thus when confronted with the real, it reminds me of the interpretations rather than the other way around.
Travelling on a train in Germany has always been one of life’s great pleasures for me. Until this trip, I had never even considered any other form of travel within Germany, let alone Europe itself. The steady sound and the passing images induce a dreamlike environment wholly conducive to creative conjecture and imaginative flourishes. Last week, as I was winding my way from Frankfurt to Weiden, I luxuriated in the visual and audible rhythms of my bummelezug connection from Nuremberg to Weiden. A superb feeling of recognition flooded my senses. I was traversing a landscape of Gerhard Richter paintings.
Gerhard Richter, Buche, Beech, 1987, 82 cm x 112 cm
Oil on canvas
Catalogue Raisonné: 637-1
I have seen dozens of Richter’s landscapes over the years in gallery and museum exhibitions. Their beatific calm instills a wonder. And aside from their vast technical gift, they are timeless. Close to, but never indulgent of, nostalgia, these paintings offer straightforward and affectionate views of a Germany unaffected by history or politics. They are immensely hopeful pieces.
Germany seen from a train ride to Weiden, July 2012 Photo: Mario M. Muller
So as the real landscapes unfurled before me, there they were. I was travelling through a Richter world. A world Richter knew, captured and shared. The frames were the windows of my train. I, too, knew these landscapes but through his renditions. So, once again, a Life imitates Art moment filled me with delight.
Next Stop on our European Adventure, Bregenz, Austria. Stay Tuned!
-Mario M. Muller, July 15th, 2012, Weiden, Germany
Dear TruffleHunters!
I’m pleased to be reporting from Germany this week where I will be bringing you a couple of TruffleHunting’s first international reports. Our first stop is Frankfurt, Germany where a couple of weeks ago saw the opening of two ambitious exhibitions by America’s premiere artistic raconteur Jeff Koons. The double show, held at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Liebieghaus Musuem is split between Koons’ polemic between Painting and Sculpture. Both exhibitions reinforce Koons as an ambitious creative force for the new century. They also highlight the intellect that courses under the bombast of execution.
Jeff Koons, The Painter
The exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle is joyous and exuberant. On display are selections of every major body of work from the early advertisement appropriations to the lusty Made in Heaven series to the gargantuan collaged compositions of the Easy Fun, Hulk Elvis and Antiquity series .
Jeff Koons The Painter Ausstellungsansicht (Installation View) © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz
The show’s most successful paintings are definitely those from the last dozen years. Collaged compositions wrought large in meticulous paint are sometimes difficult to read, often captivating and delicately humorous. The cacophony of images tumbles forth in gymnastic flips. Figure ground reversals become the norm. Art historical references tango with pop culture quotations. Advertisements coexist with titillating glimpses of fleshy porn. The tonal quality ranges from the audible din of a soccer stadium to the insistent stage whisper.
Jeff Koons
The Painter Ausstellungsansicht (Installation View) © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz
Thematically the exhibition handsomely traces Koons’ involvement with sex, childhood, mass culture and art history. He cribs the iconography of each and folds them together with deft skill like Julia Child preparing a souffle. In an age of information overload, the pastiches become the turbulent memory cache of an American male. Bytes of information, urges, memory and desire flash on the canvas triggering synaptic leaps of dislocation and insight.
Jeff Koons
Landscape (Cherry Tree), 2009 Öl auf Leinwand 274,3 x 213,4 cm
Collection of Michael & Lise Evans, New York © Jeff Koons
I personally love the works that harness the color half-tone technique. Transparent dots of color approximate the feeling of looking at a reproduction of a photo in a magazine as seen through a strong magnifying lens. At ten by 13 feet these fields of color devolve into abstract patternation. Any referent is all but obliterated by scale.
Jeff Koons
Detail-Landscape (Cherry Tree), 2009 Öl auf Leinwand 274,3 x 213,4 cm
Collection of Michael & Lise Evans, New York © Jeff Koons
Silver brushstrokes are layered on top as are gesticulations of paint that appear improvisational but are also controlled and executed to within a centimeter of intention. As I articulated in a previous post on a Koons’ exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the silver strokes are nod to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) and thus are a graphic distillation of female anatomy, desire and obsession.
Jeff Koons
The Painter Ausstellungsansicht © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Foto: Norbert Miguletz
It must be said, really at this point as an afterthought, that it doesn’t bother me a lick that Koons himself doesn’t paint these pieces. Koons the artist, is a brain trust. His entire oeuvre is wholly unique and unquestionably original and authentic. His sculptures are fabricated by master craftsmen who with the inspiration of assignment have pushed the envelope of technique and medium to heights unimaginable.
Jeff Koons
Lips, 2000 Easyfun-Ethereal Öl auf Leinwand 299,7 x 431,8 cm Privatsammlung, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery © Jeff Koons
There maybe be several people who might dream large (aesthetically and/or physically) but it is Koons who transforms the idea into actuality. His team of painters and sculptors and technicians serve Koons’ ideas and imaginative will. Content, theme and leitmotif are Koons’ and we, as viewers, witnesses these ambitious works sometimes with wonder, sometimes with awe but always with respect.
Jeff Koons, the Sculptor
The exhibition at the is Liebieghaus is a revelation. A generous sampling of Koons’ sculptural oeuvre is installed deftly in the midst of a historical museum filled with objects, sculptures and liturgical monuments of the ages. The proximity of contemporary braggadocio aside historical objects is quite marvelous.
A carved polychromed oversized poodle lies at the feet of the Virgin Mary. Buster Keaton riding a Donkey is displayed in a room right after a bust of a church scholar from 1475 wearing the same pork pie hat.
Early Koons in a religious context. Installation view of Jeff Koons The Sculptor, Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, Germany
Koons’ thematic involvement with German kitsch is one of reverence and fascination. Early on, Koons tapped the zeitgeist of German Craftsmanship by commissioning artisans to execute his ideas in hand carved wood and porcelain. The transformation of contemporary subject matter (a portrait of Micheal Jackson and Bubbles the chimp) into an oversized Hummel Figurine of porcelain never ceases to fascinate me. And ultimately transformation through both material and content is the subject of his ambitious career. The jarring and sometimes comical context heightens this transformation.
Jeff Koons, The Sculptor Installation view, Ausstellungsansicht Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Foto: Norbert Miguletz
It is ironic that several of the works are on loan from the Broad collection where I have visited them on a monthly basis at BCAM at LACMA. There, in the sterility of the modern white cube setting, they act as monuments to America’s gossamer crass culture of consumption.
Jeff Koons, The Sculptor, Installation View, Ausstellungsansicht Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Foto: Norbert Miguletz
Here in Germany they act as passionate, intimate and strangely affectionate comments on the lasting nature of idol worship. This chameleon nature of content is just another proof for me in the lasting significance of Jeff Koons, The Artist.
Jeff Koons, The Sculptor at Liebieghaus and Jeff Koons, the Painter at the Schirn Kunsthalle remain on exhibit through September 23rd, 2012.
-Mario M. Muller, Frankfurt Germany, July 4th, 2012
For the past ten years my browser’s home page has been firmly locked on the front page of ArtNet Magazine. And so it was with shock and awe that I should encounter this notice.
My Morning Cup of Disappointment.
It is a great loss to the art world that ArtNet has ceased publication. Under the watchful stewardship of Walter Robinson, ArtNet’s magazine was a clear and diverse voice of the new and noteworthy. It was fun to read. It had international perspective.
Over the years I became a greater fan of Jerry Saltz. I often bristled at Charlie Finch’s missives but found him an invaluable wasabi-like palette cleanser. Reverend Jen’s off center narratives made me smile and sometimes sulk. And Donald Kuspit’s analytical bent brought me new and sustained appreciation for people like Roberto Matta, Otto Dix and Robert Graham. (I’ve linked each writer to but one of their outstanding pieces. Fortunately, ArtNet archives will remain open.)
These and countless other contributors enlivened the essential dialogue that makes art resonate and fosters sophistication and connoisseurship.
I am a writer about Art in no small part because of the wonderful, intellectual, conversational and current coverage I encountered there on a daily basis.
The Readership of TruffleHunting approaches capacity at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, NY
Last weekend TruffleHunting garnered it’s 20,000th reader. It is with sheer delight that I share this. To think that I’m reaching the visual equivalent of Arthur Ashe Stadium’s capacity boggles my brain. This fact, coupled with ArtNet’s demise, makes me even more adamant that the need for intelligent, non-partisan artistic dialogue has never been greater. Buck-naked Emperors should be called out and the delicate whispers of visual alchemists should be championed. I’m just the one to do it and I’m doubling down.
-Mario M. Muller, Los Angeles, June 25th, 2012
In the mid-1980′s I was given an uncommon insight to press manipulation. I held in my hands a press release from Michael Jackson stating that in all current and future references to the singer the tag line “King of Pop” had to follow his name. This was not a request but a demand. The implicit threat was that if this was not met that there could be access restrictions imposed. As the years wore on, the moniker “King of Pop” was repeated so often by the mainstream media that it stuck. And far from being an editorial adjective that grew organically from critical acclaim, it became a fait accompli delivered by the massive PR wheels grinding out reputations.
I thought of this recently after the death of Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade assigned himself the moniker “Painter of Light.” He repeated it in the same way that Jackson did and the obliging media acquiesced. True to form, his obits included the tagline albeit with quotations or added the words “self-described” as an artificial arch of the eyebrow.
A near perfect example of Kinkade Iconography.
Thomas Kinkade was a distinctly American fabrication. A successful artist who campaigned as an anti-artist. He wooed an adoring fan base with rhetoric that was both folksy and anti-establishment. He created a market out of thin air that was based on the democratization of the unique. And he veiled his pursuits, his monetary value and importance in distinctly religious terminology. He was America’s version of a Tea Party artist. To this end, his desire was to create art for the 99%, while building a marketing empire of licensing and reproduction that would squarely define him as a denizen of the 1%.
Kinkade’s business model had more in common with Madoff than Art Basel. His company declared bankruptcy in 2010. This was the same year that he left his wife of 30 years. Or maybe she left him.
The Fallen
Many in the art world were either completely unaware of him or dismissively disdainful. I have heard all manner of Schadenfreude at revelations of his recent infidelity and his descent into alcoholism. My disdain is reserved for those who should feel such Schadenfreude. Kinkade’s unraveling, personal and professional, can be parsed and diagnosed but ultimately he believed his own PR. This is where Michael Jackson and Thomas Kinkade once again collide. America will always look for a hero to place their faith and trust in. In politics-John Edwards, in religion-Jimmy Swaggart, in music-Mr. Jackson, in finance-Bernie Madoff and in art-Thomas Kinkade. America has always loved their preachers and carneys. So the larger the pedestal erected, the farther the anointed risk falling. For those who believed in him, his descent is only further proof of his greatness. By their logic only the inspired are vilified. A slice of the passions raised from both his admirers and detractors can be handsomely witnessed in the seemingly unending comments after the article in the Los Gatos Patch. The vitriol-filled debate has been amazing to witness.
Kinkade’s achievements were in the art form of marketing and PR rather than painting or aesthetic discourse (I do write this never actually having seen an original painting in person. The work always struck me as being related to German Advent calendars. Note to the estate: another licensing deal awaits!) But his story, again distinctly American, falls squarely into the literary genre of Oedipus and tragedy. Contemporary temptations coupled with hubris.
On Kinkade’s art there’s no end of the discourse. My favorite exposure to both the artist and his art is a wonderful press conference (in two parts on YouTube) for an exhibition titled “Heaven on Earth,” at CalState Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center, in Santa Ana, California, in 2004. The show was unironically curated by the intelligent and thoughtful artist and curator Jeffery Vallance. The more I see of Vallance, the more I appreciate and admire him, but I’m afraid that will have to be another post entirely. (Part Two of the Press conference is Linked Here. Part Two contains the charming bit where Kinkade likens himself to Monet and the Salon de Refuse!)
If Michael Jackson could become the King of Pop by means of press manipulation then maybe Bridget Riley should hire a PR firm and cement her reputation as the “Queen of Op.”
-Mario M. Muller, April 28th, 2012, Los Angeles, CA
Below is a highly subjective sampling of links that I’ve encountered over that last 6 weeks since Kinkade’s passing. Each piece is linked. Enjoy!
A musing from the Associated press via Artdaily
A sampling of the official Kinkade site bio. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the website and the offering of time payment opportunities financed by Wells Fargo is truly illuminating.
Jerry Saltz weighs in pragmatically. Fairly fascinating comment stream on this one too.
Doug Harvey‘s informative and tart essay published in the catalogue that accompanied the Vallance curated exhibition in 2004.
