"Lobby Art" by Bonnie Chau
Last week, I watched Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 documentary The Price of Everything, which examines the perversely tangled relationship between contemporary art and the market through the perspectives of artists, critics, curators, gallerists, collectors, and others in and around the art world. About halfway through, art historian Alexander Nemerov is at The Frick Collection looking at the Vermeer painting “Officer and Laughing Girl,” rhapsodizing about light and the soul, and like the good art history nerd that I am, I’m totally caught up in it all, thinking about Vermeer and the depiction of natural light. This leads me to the phrase “painter of light” which I seem to recall refers to J.M.W. Turner, but I’m not positive, so I google it.
It turns out that it does refer to Turner, but also refers to Thomas Kinkade, the infamous artist of glowy garden cottages and lighthouses, who, in 1996, trademarked himself as the “Painter of Light.” I think he must have been a bit in the ether during my childhood in California in the 80s and 90s—Kinkade spent most of his life in Northern/Central California, and I likely strolled past many a Kinkade painting or print in my first decade or two in places like Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Sausalito, San Francisco, Carmel, Monterey, Pebble Beach, La Jolla, Santa Barbara. My only connection to him has been a standard, superficial disdain, almost a visceral knee-jerk abhorrence in reaction to the sight of his fluffy pastels. (Other adjectives I considered here: chilling, grotesque, skin-crawling, creepy, disorienting. To be honest, I don’t know that I had those judgments as a child. If I judged his paintings at all, I suspect I thought them quaint, which evolved over the years into cheesy, which evolved into disorienting, uncanny, creepy, then skin-crawling, grotesque, chilling. Is this the evolution of cynicism?)
It felt bizarre to suddenly be in the Thomas Kinkade internet hole, thinking about how though he seems universally condemned for kitsch and commercialism, millions of people love and own his artwork. Urban legend has it that at one point, one in twenty American homes had a Kinkade print. The documentary presents the shitshow-circus relationship between contemporary art and money, the camera following Jeff Koons around at parties and in his studio where dozens of assistants meticulously churn out his Gazing Ball paintings. Koons, too, seems to have become somewhat “universally” condemned (though he still has a fan in Marilyn Minter.) In the documentary, collector Stefan Edlis observes that “the real estate people started to think of Jeff Koons as lobby art.” “A kiss of death,” Sotheby’s EVP/Chairman Amy Cappellazzo says. “Context is really key. If you see it in a lobby it just kind of disappears. And then you never get out of the lobby once you’re in there.”
Having lived in NYC for most of the last decade, and worked in many literary/publishing-adjacent jobs, I have spent many a minute thinking and talking about literature versus the publishing industry. But I first started thinking about this more general relationship between art and commerce as a teenager, in the context of music and the idea of selling out. Orange County, California in the mid- to late-90s had a thriving indie music scene: it was a real hot spot for alternative pop punk, and ground zero for third wave ska. In 1997, sophomore year of high school, my friends and I turned sixteen, and this meant we could start driving to local shows. Mostly we went to see small bands like Rx Bandits, CodeName: Rocky, Suburban Legends, Slow Gherkin, and Ozma perform in small venues like Chain Reaction in Anaheim, the Glass House in Pomona, Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana, and sometimes in bowling alleys or in malls or nearby college campuses. By then, the biggest bands associated with the Orange County ska scene, such as No Doubt and Sublime, were too huge and though once in a while we went to see some big Green Day or Offspring or Blink 182 show, or some medium-sized bands like Reel Big Fish and Save Ferris, it was always up for debate: who had sold out? If you got onto a major label were you a sell-out? If you played Vans Warped Tour were you too big? I don’t know that I thought directly about the tentacles of money, but certainly that idea was there, that something changed in the artistry, once fame and fortune appeared.
I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap write about in the introduction to The Racial Imaginary anthology, about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society. Given this, there seems to be something fallacious about the ideal of art for art’s sake. In The Price of Everything, the painter Larry Poons is the adorably prickly foil to Koons’s smarmy veneer. How can we help but love the octogenarian Poons, grizzled and wiry, spryly walking around his ramshackle grounds and studio in upstate NY, his crazy hair and sweater and hat, slopping paint around with his hands, nimbly climbing up and down ladders, both grumpy and romantic, talking about wanting to be like Beethoven, wanting to be free to do or be anything, free of sameness, free of expectations or comparisons against others’ work and his own past work, saying things like “art and money have no intrinsic hookup at all.”
Though I easily side with Poons and those who seem to operate outside the system, I have to think that even if there is no direct line between your artwork and the money you earn to pay for your housing and your food, money and art are still a part of the same whole equation of your life. The two people in the documentary closest to my heart are Poons and Nemerov—whose philosophies I find most resonant, in terms of my own views toward art, and in terms of the artist friends I have made over the years—and yet they too are both undeniable products of the establishment, and continue to operate within the bounties of its privileges: Poons’s work is in collections around the world and in all the top museums in America, he races vintage motorcycles, and his shows are reviewed in the New York Times; Nemerov is the son of poet Howard Nemerov and nephew of Diane Arbus, and has spent his academic career associated with the Stanford and Yale art history departments.
Kinkade has occasionally intersected with the contemporary art world. In 2004, artist Jeffrey Vallance, a Guggenheim Fellow most widely known for his work as a conceptual/performance artist, and who has taught for decades in programs at UCLA, CalArts, and others, curated a show titled “Heaven on Earth,” of Kinkade’s work at Cal State Fullerton’s gallery and the university’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, whose exhibition catalogue included essays by longtime L.A. Weekly art critic Doug Harvey, and Hayward Gallery curator Ralph Rugoff, who most recently directed the 2019 Venice Biennale. In 2011, Duke University Press published Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, a book of scholarly essays edited by art historian Alexis L. Boylan. In a review of the book in Artforum, Joachim Pissarro and David Carrier wrote that scholars “approach Kinkade’s work with the aseptic gloves of tested and accepted theoreticians and historians of culture… primarily as a sociological phenomenon” but it’s noted that Kinkade himself takes his work very sincerely—the paintings are to be taken at face value: sentimental, cozy, hopeful, simple, innocent, gentle, tranquil, romantic, anodyne. This very sincerity appears to be a primary obstacle to Kinkade’s acceptance—if he were to admit to some sort of ironic distance, it would be more palatable. This seems to me kind of sad. In a Los Angeles Times article about the show, however, Vallance said:
It wouldn’t be a good show if you did it with irony. The thing that most intrigues me about Kinkade is the way he markets his objects and the way that he infiltrates himself into the lives of everyday people. He multiplies his images on everything. These are in millions of homes around the world. It is what Warhol wanted to do but Kinkade has done it even better….
For Vallance, the value of the work sits in Kinkade’s straightforward belief in it:
[The role of Christian faith in Kinkade’s work] is another area that the contemporary art world has a hard time with, that I find interesting. He expresses what he believes and puts that in his art. That is not the trend in the high-art world at the moment, the idea that you can express things spiritually and be taken seriously. What I like to do in my art is to present ideas that are difficult. It is always difficult to present serious religious ideas in an art context. That is why I like Kinkade.
In this same article, Kinkade mentions Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg, artists held up as Ab-Ex heavy-hitters in The Price of Everything, as two of his favorite artists. “I’ve never been at odds with the world of contemporary artists. If there is any animosity, it’s one-sided,” he said. I try to imagine Kinkade thinking about Kline and Rauschenberg, and I try to imagine Kline or Rauschenberg or Koons, thinking about Kinkade who was inside the capitalist machine but certainly outside the machine of critical acclaim and cultural elitism. It seems rather easy to draw the line between where Kinkade’s work is situated, and where Koons’s work is situated—I can’t say I’m a fan of either one’s work, but I can say I am a fan of the lobby. In The Price of Everything, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby both talk about the value of having work placed in museums and critic Jerry Saltz talks about the disappearance of auctioned work into private residences. A voiceover by auctioneer Simon de Pury during the opening scenes of the documentary intones:
Art and money have always gone hand-in-hand. It’s very important for good art to be expensive. You only protect things that are valuable. If something has no financial value, people don’t care. They will not give it the necessary protection. The only way to make sure cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value.
It seems to be a slippery slope from care, protection, and survival to an exclusionary existence. Many museums also come with a load of problems: prohibitive entry fees, retrograde curation, problems with Boards, HR, funding streams, and unions; but theoretically it’s for everyone. A lobby, too, is for all.
During the University of Chicago’s recent online colloquium, “Translation and Language Justice in Border Zones,” Don Mee Choi referred to Poetics of Relation, in which Édouard Glissant writes that “imagination changes mentalities, however slowly it may go about this.” Perhaps it’s just the documentarian’s agenda, but ultimately, watching The Price is Everything, I came away with the intense feeling that each of these talking heads believes wholly in the transformative power of art, the power of imagination to change mentalities. I am even kind of convinced that Koons believes he’s doing something potentially transformative. You look at photos of his studio and work from the 1970s, and his inflatable toy and mirror work is what he was preoccupied with back then too, in a different form. You watch the crazed look in his eye as he talks about his current project and it feels like it’s his weird thing, like he is making what he really wants or needs to be making, maybe as much as Poons is.
Inga Rubenstein the collector begins weeping upon recollection of seeing a Damien Hirst butterfly piece at Art Basel in Miami for the first time. Cappellazzo talks about Gerhard Richter’s “A B St. James” painting and says, “Living with a picture like this could change your life. If you let it. Very few of us live with such majesty.” She recalls the first artwork she fell in love with, Giacomo Balla’s painting “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” at a museum in her hometown. Nemerov talks about Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” and says, “Can you imagine what it would be like to have this in one’s house, and how irradiated one would feel as one sat down for breakfast with the sports page and Special K? It would just be such an overpowering, sacred presence.” I’m convinced when Poons, Akunyili Crosby, George Condo, and Minter talk about their creative processes and the evolution of their work. In Kinkade’s own essay in the “Heaven on Earth” catalogue, he writes:
Fine art is the most powerful tool for impacting a culture that I can think of… a painting invades the most private of human spaces, the home, and becomes a part of that person’s life for the rest of their time on the planet… I have often had collectors tell me that a painting of mine is the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing they see at night.
All of these people have staked their lives, often their livelihoods, on being passionate about art, and many of them are paid a lot of money for it. Does a truly sincere belief in what you’re doing with your art override the vicissitudes of money and the market? Maybe.
When in Poetics of Relation, Glissant writes that “Every poetics is a palliative for eternity” isn’t that also what Poons is saying when he says, “My only defense against fate is color”? Isn’t this also at the root of what Saltz is saying toward the end of the documentary: “Everybody should make fun of the art world. Is it absurd? Yes. Is it necessary? Probably no more necessary than religion, I would argue.” Kinkade’s own art practice was fueled by spiritual awakening and steeped in his Christian faith—all that light is God’s light. I imagine that for all these people—Glissant, Poons, Koons, Kinkade—art is a way of encountering death (mortality, eternity, fate, whatever) and engaging with what looms. I don’t know. It’s hard out there. There is a lot looming. Death comes for us all, right? Maybe better to be reminded of our mortality—death+life—however which way, in pastel, in stainless-steel-shine, in the lobby.
Bonnie Chau is a writer and translator from Southern California. She earned her MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University; and has received fellowship and residency support from Kundiman, Art Farm Nebraska, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Black Mountain Institute. She is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (2018), and is currently an editor at Public Books and the Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
