Week Two

Inspiration

From the book Stray Stories by theBathos (or that's their Etsy name anyway)

By Sherri Dupree Bemis

Also by Sherri

Work

The Giant Beast Made of Fallen Leaves pannel 7 (I think?)



Reading Response: One-for-All, Thomas Kinkade

Reading this was a mixture of gratifying and crushing. Doing the math, Kinkaid made a bit above $4 million in 1999 alone just on his publicly traded company. On one hand, good for him. He's smart for turning his work into an entire world that is almost more engrossed in itself (elite collector societies, special certificates, etc) than with any individual painting. On the other, what the hell is this crap. He's like Andy Warhol but instead of doing anything edgy he's doing the opposite. Reading this reminded me of a visiting artist we had, Romero Britto, whose work I found horribly trite, but his marketing skills ridiculously impressive. He had his own store on cruise ships! Romero made a point of saying to "Not look to deep inside" because there's a lot of sad feelings. He "stays on the surface" because it's happy. And that sells. I think, coming from a world of mass produced comics and graphic novels, I can appreciate good marketing, branding (we all know a Tim Burton movie when we see it) and everything involving playing to a genre. I think the only issue I had was the book saying that the artists who disliked the kitschy happy-forever sentiment were in a minority who lived "outside mainstream culture." Well duh. Most art is not mainstream. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, but I think Katy Perry can admit that she's not playing on the same field as Muse. Pop is pop and the people who live "outside the mainstream" are not the minority. They are the artists undergraduates will be reading about after they die of poverty and starvation in a half century.