And memory insists on pining...

All right, Ben. I am nearly in complete agreement with you here. We do need utopian art, art that serves as a signpost showing how far we have fallen and how it might have been. But I jump off this train at the point of calling Thomas Kinkade such an artist.

Putting aside Kinkade's unethical business practices and manipulative, temple merchant co-option of Christianity, even ignoring the fact that he's a world-class schmuck and an obnoxiously saccharine artist, I still find something reprehensible in his work. He doesn't "hold up a picture of a world without sin or evil," he just lies. The world as he shows it to us has never existed, never might have existed. It's a gnostic fantasia, sanitized of everything bodily, everything human. There is no sex in Kinkade, no community, nor any of the thousand little anomalies that make human life interesting. There's no death, either. There aren't even any people—note how rarely the human figure makes an appearance in Kinkade, and when one does it is one-dimensional, a travesty of a parody of a caricature meant to make us long for something that never was. (Insert here your preferred version of the standard Wheaton anti-gnostic spiel if you wish.) Kinkade's is not "a world as it would be seen if we could see the glorious beauty hidden in all things." He isn't revealing anything hidden, he's only slathering on something more, drenching the things of this world in a beauty of his own making. It reminds me of how in Klimt's art, that rich glow doesn't emanate from the women, but rather is something he gives to them, patronizingly, because they please him as objects. It's disgusting. And unlike Klimt, Kinkade doesn't even have aesthetics going for him.

Kinkade simply isn't interested in the substance of things. His own self-appellation, "painter of light," indicates that much. If he can be said to have any kind of "artistic vision," it is a hamfisted gnosticism, involving paving over the physical world, steamrolling it with light. This is a pet peeve of mine: so many artists and even more "artsy" types are obsessed with light—the play of it, how it strikes the eye. It's become an aesthetic cheap shot. Do a flickr search for "sunset" or "clouds" and see what I mean. I wonder if light is one of the few things of this world which catches the gnostic eye, since it is so insubstantial yet so clearly essential (see also: wind, fire). But what matters is where the light falls, and what it falls on.

A much better alternative, I think, who really does represent what Ben is talking about is Norman Rockwell (see my Dave Hickey quote down there). But actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I have to ask myself: what really is the point of utopian art? Why point at where we might have been? What use could that possibly have other than to drown us in remorse and nostalgia? The art of the might-have-been seems to me to be at best a distraction, and at worst nihilistic. Think of Jay Gatsby. Quentin Compson. "Summer Storm." The better art addresses where we are now, and projects where we might be; it speaks of redemption. We look at Kinkade and see nothing recognizable, nothing of ourselves; his scenes are as alien as if he'd painted the surface of the moon. But with a work of redemption—The Divine Comedy, The Winter's Tale, Horae Canonicae—we watch as something flawed is elevated and transfigured, and recognize the real possibility of such a thing happening to us. Utopian art is crying over spilt milk; redemptive art is dynamic in the best sense of the word. More importantly, redemptive art does not commit that cardinal sin of being boring: utopia is static, redemption has a plot.

And I am reminded now of a magnificent passage by John Updike (whose recent passing I want to talk more about here some other time) near the end of Rabbit, Run:

"He has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the going through quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blowing inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of a paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it glances his retina." (Updike's italics)

We must, must deal with those dark, tangled, visceral things. I agree with Ben that there is perhaps not enough Edenic hope in art today, and I too am a bit tired of the "here's a tiny bit of hope in a fucked-up world" movie.* But to simply lie, to pulverize anything real under a dripping ton of sentimentality, is utterly irresponsible. Plus, y'know, it's hideous.

I don't ever want to think this much about that man again.

*I'll talk sometime about how the scummy-sublime aesthetic (e.g. Magnolia, Fight Club, etc.) has developed its own prettiness (as opposed to beauty), throwing out signifiers without earning them and expecting the audience to follow. Which, ultimately, places its practitioners in the Kinkadian camp.