Thomas Kinkade Gets ‘Cannibalized’ in Recent Exhibition

Poor Thomas Kinkade. All he wanted to do was paint light. Recently there were those mean people he had to pay $2.1 million to because they said he and his company scammed them. Now there are a bunch of San Franciscan artists who are poking fun at his well-lit artwork at recent show called “Kinkade Cannibalized! An Exhibition of Kinkade Paintings.” The show, hosted by the collage artist and gallery owner Winston Smith, asked a handful of artists to take existing paintings by the “best selling artist of all time” and alter them in some way. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, while some ripped him apart, deciding to critique his perhaps overly-idealistic work, others decided that maybe it was just fancy pants elitists who had a problem with him, including Smith himself, as well as famous comic publisher Ron Turner:

Turner, who was one of the first publishers to feature the work of the now widely known illustrator R. Crumb, said he also has published a book on Kinkade’s work.

“I’m not anti-Kinkade,” Turner said. “I think he gets under everyone’s skin because he glorifies the fairy tale. Kinkade is a master marketer, and I think the idealizing of the images is Kinkade’s own inside joke.”

Photos of the event and some of the pieces displayed can be found here.

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