Some time back (2005) the BBC conducted a poll in England that asked people to pick out the most popular painting in their land. In a field crowded with van Gogh’s evocative pictures and Monet’s breathtaking impressions, the winner turned out to be a rather ordinary-by-today’s-standards painting by J.M.W. Turner titled the ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. Somewhat more surprising was the fact that the second prize also went to a similarly bucolic oil painting by Constable – ‘The Haywain’. (Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck was ranked fourth – one of my favorites)
J. M. W. Turner, ‘The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up’, 1838, Oil on canvas
John Constable, ‘The Hay Wain’, 1821, Oil on canvas, 51″ × 72″
If wisdom of the masses is to be believed, then it seems that people voted for paintings that bought them calm, peace, tranquility and visions of a better, more hopeful future.
I came to this conclusion while walking around in the New Brunswick, NJ mall the other day coaxing my three year old son to get a haircut while pausing to look at some ghastly paintings of sweet looking sunrises, sunsets and landscapes hung in a mall gallery/framing shop. I thought to myself, why would people buy this art? It all seems the same and the subject has not changed over the last ten years of my brief sojourns inside mall galleries (maybe they should be called framing shops). The answer was simple: It had to serve a social function.
The art of the renaissance always seemed to be a bulwark against the forces that might topple religion off its perch and hence most of the subjects seemed to reinforce and serve as an effective muse to edifying religion. Victorian themes tended to be sweetly cloying with stories of hope, redemption and success – even if religion par se did not shine through as strongly as the renaissance, some of the common values universally dished out by a majority of the world religions seem to rise higher among the emotions and thoughts expressed. The 19th century bought with it rigorous uncertainty – among others, Darwin, Mendel and Boltzmann indirectly questioned the very nature of infinite wisdom. Suddenly one realized that religion alone could not provide succor in a random, chancy world of Heisenberg’s uncertainly, axioms and postulates.
At about this time, artists tended to veer in two broad directions, the first kind were those that created the pictures that seemed to embed messages of cheer (albeit cloying) to the people – the artists that catered to the plebeians. The second kind were artists who tended to explore art in conceptual, ‘pure art’ ways – those that did not cater to the masses. (I do not want to comment too much on the second kind here – maybe for a later post as the looser conceptual thinking encouraged by them had its own distinct advantages not seen by everyone).
When the hoi polloi vote for Turner and when malls all around the country display sickly sweet oil paintings of cottages, red roofs, waterfalls, crashing waves and when people have a rapturous look while talking about a painter of light like Kinkade, it is probably the first kind of artist they are talking about, the kind that offers them some kind of a compensatory hope while the succor offered by religion slowly diminishes as we move more and more into a scientific, technological age. In that sense these artists are trying to give hope to people who had previously got this same dosage of comfort from believing in God.
What are your thoughts? I am interested. I wrote this more as a way to clarify my thoughts and I hope this does not come across as a little bit disjointed. If it does, please accept my sincere apologies…
Ouch! I have to admit I like the Turner and the Constable myself, though I can’t abide Kinkade. They may have something in common precisely because Kinkade is appealing to that now-familiar cultural concept of painting, but Turner and Constable were both more innovative in their day. Constable certainly had an eye to public acceptability, but he also did many plein air sketches of clouds and sky and was a major player in advancing the concept of the picturesque, which has indeed remained important through to the present. At least some of Turner’s work was, I believe, considered outrageous by many in the art establishment, and he’s often credited with influence on both Impressionists and abstract painters.
Recently I was reading an interview with Wolf Kahn, in which he said: “I think that the greatest sin an artist can be accused of is telling people things that they already know.” A related idea in a paper I may post on is that an essential aspect of creativity involves finding something in the artwork that was not consciously put there by the artist. By both these definitions, I think Kinkade is a lot less creative than the others.
Sunil, the first thing I noticed in your post was that the survey was conducted by the BBC in England, and that the top two choices were paintings by British artists. It’s kind of like going around in NYC and asking people who the best baseball team is.
Regarding the galleries in malls, those are framing shops. They’re not catering to people interested in art. Their customers are people walking around the mall. If you were to ask those same people who their favorite writer is, you’d probably get a different answer than if you went to a good bookstore, or a college campus.
Most people don’t think that much about art. When they do think about it, it’s usually the artists they’ve been exposed to: on greeting cards (Monet), through interesting anecdotes (Van Gogh’s ear), or on television (the Painter of Lite). It’s not like they’re going out looking.
Years ago I spent a week camping up in Kern County, north of Los Angeles, and helping Christo install his Umbrellas (not just me, there were a lot of us). Most of the people who lived up there had never been in an art gallery or museum, but they all knew about Christo. You should have heard some of the conversations in the diners and at the gas stations! They were hanging around talking about what is and isn’t art. Kind of like we do. Many of the people I met said they had been skeptical at first, but that as they learned about Christo’s work they came to love it.
Most people aren’t going to work that hard trying to learn about art. It’s just not that important to them. But when they are exposed to something new, it’s interesting how much they will embrace it once it’s familiar.
I think Kinkade is a lot less creative than the others.
Kinkade may not be creative as an artist, but he’s an extremely creative marketer. He very calculatedly developed those cottage images to appeal to the grandma market, and he’s made millions of dollars from that decision.
I wouldn’t compare his work to that of other artists. It’s more appropriate to think of it in the same category as Pet Rocks and The Da Vinci Code.
I love the painting by Turner.
David and Steve,
Agreed that the paintings in our malls and the ones by Kinkade are not the greatest examples in the world of art and may not be considered real estate in the art county, but there must be something to the fact that people are drawn to scenes of innocence, beauty and bliss (similar to reasons why people in England turn to Turner than new age stars like Hirst) – the pictures must be serve some other function than just ‘appreciation of art’. One of my premises here was to highlight the fact that the mall pictures may be serving as a substitute to the fading aura that religion holds for the multitudes who cannot be oblivious to science and the rational ramifications thereof…
The bliss that religion offered to these people might as well be served by the cloying art of the malls.
Maybe it is just that we who are a little more closely associated with art do not see it so – for the very reason that we are closely associated with art… I wonder…
No, this was not a discussion on the artistic merits of Kinkade – who I agree was an astute marketer…
Going by what Wolf Kahn said “I think that the greatest sin an artist can be accused of is telling people things that they already know.” – I must be a big sinner. I try and chronicle aspects of poverty and just about everybody knows about it…
Turner painted, in his own pre-Impressionistic way, slaves being thrown off a slave ship. He also painted Europa being kidnapped by Zeus as a bull (much to my joy, this work is right down the street from my office).
In the Haywain, Constable brings to light a person who is not the usual art buyer or artists’ subject–a worker and probably a poor one to boot (GASP).
I think the title alone of the Turner example implies something other than peaceful tranquility, as does that amazing sky he painted.
The 19th Century was definitely not the first period of time that people began questioning religion, for example, the Enlightenment period was a good 100 years earlier.
Kinkade paints inferior works with no artistic merit whatsoever and they are for people who have no understanding of art.
I have to disagree with your statement regarding the two groups of differing artists.
There were the Academics and “the others.” In the 19th century, there were the Romantics and the Neo-Classicists/Academics. None of these groups of artists were painting specifically for their audience, per se. It’s not a good idea to have such neat divides as this, or to make a brief comment about who the artists were painting for; it would take a post of my own to fully explain.
Since I agree with David that most people are not very aware of art, I don’t think it can function for a significant number as a substitute for religion in a spiritual sense, e.g. providing comfort. More likely, mall-style pictures are simply seen as the “expected,” culturally appropriate way to decorate, just as declaring oneself religious is more or less the cultural norm. I would not be surprised if Kinkade isn’t more popular among those who consider themselves more Christian. But that doesn’t necessarily negate your point, and anyway it doesn’t address the question of why current mall style is the popular norm.
Regarding your creativity: of course everyone “knows” about poverty, just as we know about ships and sunsets and streams. But the way you Sunil say something about it is quite new in my experience, and therefore I consider it anew. Actually, I think most of the valuable things we learn are sort of re-recognitions of things we already know, though incompletely.
Sunil,
You seem to be good at getting us into various contortional contretemps. And so I’ll add another —
Re: “… the mall pictures may be serving as a substitute to the fading aura that religion holds for the multitudes …
The bliss that religion offered to these people might as well be served by the cloying art of the malls.”
My memory of religious art of the middle ages, when if you weren’t religious, you kept very very quiet about it, is that that art is pretty gruesome stuff. All those blood dripping Christs and tortured folks and flames in hell — nothing blissful about the art. The religion itself (particularly as it centered around Mary and/or meditation) may have been blissful, but lots of the art was not.
Of course there are all those nicely centered madonnas in their blue robes, but somehow what sticks with me is the crown of thorns.
I’m afraid I have to agree with Steve — mall art is the “expected” — the conforming, the thing you don’t have to actually see, like a pair of old shoes beside the door. And it’s thought of as “art” because real art is too precious to hang in malls — remember Danto’s idea that contemporary art can be defined only by context? People will pay what always seems to me to be a decent amount for a bad Kinkade (or a good pair of shoes) but won’t ante up for a decent painting from the local art sale. I think we’ve taught folks too well that art is precious and therefore can’t be purchased as you would a pair of shoes. Whereas I think you should buy enough art to rotate on a weekly (or better, daily) basis and begin your collection with anything that a real person using real tools (computers are real) has created. But then, no one asked me what I thought…sigh
afraid I have to agree with Steve
Is that such a scary prospect?
Definitely terrifying!!! What would we have to talk about if we were too agreeable?
Not only is your comment disjointed, you have completely ignored a plethora of innovative and daring painters in order to support your pseudo intellectual utterances of what you considered important movements in art. It’s obvious that you think naught of the genius of Turner and Constable. Turner, as you are well aware, is considered one of the greatest landscape artists of all time and the precursor to the Impressionist movement. And to downplay the brilliance of Constable and the Hudson River School he inspired borders upon ignorance.
TO even mention Kincaide and the amateur mall artists in the same breath with the Master painters such as Turner and Constable would be laughable if it weren’t so despicable.
Both classical paintings follow the law of the Golden Proportion. They are nice to been seen and admire.