Shedding Light on Kinkade. (Letters to the Editor).(Letter to the Editor)

William F. Jasper's article on Thomas Kinkade ("A Beacon in the Night," December 17th issue) allows Mr. Kinkade the opportunity to slander, however unintentionally, people who are in fact his Christian brethren. Some of the most vigorous critics of Mr. Kinkade's art are devout Christians who also work professionally in the visual arts and who find his work highly skilled but predictable, safe, and stale. These are hardly "venomous" attacks by apostles of "darkness," but responses from serious artists who are engaged in the risks of creating work that challenges, inspires, and edifies. Media Arts Group, Inc., which markets Kinkade's images, is very protective of this artist, even secretive, when approached for information. While posing him as a "leading American artist" they insist that any critique "reflect positively upon the artist," thus sheltering him from the kind of honest critiques to which any other serious artist is open and vulnerable. They want puff pieces, which THE NEW AMERICAN has, unfortunately , produced yet another example.

The myth of the art world's energetic attack on Kinkade seems to be expressed through these typical puff pieces (another of which appeared recently in Christianity Today), suggesting that it is part of the overall marketing strategy for his work. I know of few people in the "art world" who even think about Thomas Kinkade, much less oppose him. Yet, even in the realms of academe there is an interest in Kinkade as a social phenomenon, if not an artistic one, with papers at academic conferences discussing his work.

Kinkade is a marketing genius, and a painter of obvious and considerable skill. That he puts that skill in the service of a safe and predictable product does not justify his dismissal of other artists with such mean-spirited rhetoric. That he does so suggests that there is darkness in the ...