YouTube comment, on Thomas Kincade

[brooksmoses]

Copying a comment I made on this Behind the Bastards vidcast episode on Thomas Kincade:

I think one interesting thing about Kinkade's art comes up in the juxtaposition of his goal "to make people feel good" while, as you mention about 44:30, the only emotion that he tries to put in to do that is "comfort". I'm looking around my dining room as I'm watching this, and on my walls I have three photographs and a pencil drawing that IMO are reasonably good art, and all of them are there mostly just make me feel good. But they have a range of emotions behind that feeling, and only a little of that is comfort.

It kind of comes off like Kincade is ... well, to allude to a Princess Bride quote, it comes off like he's selling something, and not just in the literal sense of selling the art. By forcefully denying that life contains other things besides absence-of-pain, his art is selling something that can be a lot the "be quiet and don't worry and everything is okay" sort of emotional direction that tempting fairy-tale villains use to seduce the heroes into their traps. I expect this is why it goes so well with the Chthuloid horrors and the Star Wars militaria.

It's an interesting episode, and I'd recommend it pretty highly. Also it guest-stars Randy Millholland, who I only knew from his Something Positive webcomic, and it turns out (as one might expect from the comic) he's a fascinating person. And he looks nothing like what I imagined him to look like from reading the webcomic, but apparently that's just me.

Also there's some interesting parallels between what Kincade was doing and what people who are generating a lot of viral AI-generated images that are going around recently are trying to do.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Intriguing. makes a note