I mean, that shit is right up your alley, isn't it?

Idea: An art project where someone paints stroke-perfect copies of Thomas Kinkade tableaux, but with a sordid element: a BDSM scene through the window of a cozy cottage, a drunk splayed across the cobblestone street, a child run down by the Clydesdale-drawn carriage. All done in that soft-edged style and drenched in that freakishly dappled light, natch. Am I the only one who thinks that would be hilarious?

Thinking about that, I'm reminded of Komar and Melamid's People's Choice project, where they conducted a poll to determine the Most Wanted and Least Wanted paintings of several countries. In America, for example, they found that a majority of people desired paintings that featured realistic depictions, natural scenes, families, or historical figures, which K. & M. subsequently combined to create the theoretically Most Wanted Painting. Incidentally, they later conducted a similar survey to determine America's Most and Least Wanted Songs, which must be heard to be believed.

On the subject of much-maligned artists, I also wanted to share this passage from Air Guitar, Dave Hickey's brilliant, paradigm-inverting essay collection, on Norman Rockwell:

The people who hate Rockwell, however—the preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians—inevitably mistake the artist's profession for their own. They accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgments, which he never does. Nor could he ever, since far from being a fascist manipulator, Rockwell is always giving as much as he can to the world he sees....
People are regularly out of sync with the world in Rockwell's pictures, but it is not the end of the world....But the pictures always rhyme—and the faces rhyme and the bodies rhyme as well, in compositions so exquisitely tuned they seem to have always been there—as a good song seems to have been written forever. The implication, of course, is that these domestic disasters are redeemed by the internal rhymes of civil society and signify the privilege of living in it, which they most certainly do.

I would not apply a similarly gracious reading to T.K.'s work—it is too crass and false (and not in the Warhol way)—but Hickey gives us a beautiful reminder of what art can be and a challenge to crawl out of our dark caves and make something big and openhearted and democratic in the best way.