An Unapolegetic Declaration of a "Typical" Elitist Attitude

Paper delivered by Brian Curtis, Associate Professor, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
at the 2010  SECAC. Conference in Richmond, VA, October 22, 2010
for a panel titled "Thomas Kinkade in the Classroom"
Chaired by Julia Alderson, Humboldt State University

In contrast to the traditional studio model upon which my courses are structured, the wholesale curriculum re-definitions underway around the country have purposefully moved away from the Darwinian model and replaced it with a pop-culture lemming-stampede to jettison everything old and bring in anything new.  Old is bad, new is good. As a result, the most popular word in contemporary education is innovation.  I would go so far as to liken it to an obsession. However, please take a moment to remember that the term innovation, despite its current ubiquity in today’s academic jargon as a synonym for improved, only means “new” or “different” and as the value free term it is, does not guarantee any benefit or improvement. Perhaps some of you will have heard of the Hindenburg, the Edsel automobile, Thalidomide as a sedative for pregnant women, the insecticide DDT, Betamax video format, cold fusion, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Certainly most of you are old enough to remember the Dot-com bubble, Microsoft VISTA operating system, pre-emptive war in Iraq, financial de-regulation of Wall Street, exorbitant executive compensation, sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps, and most recently, the Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer. Innovations all.

The Hindenburg Disaster

Thalidamide victim

Flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Deepwater Horizon disaster

To this litany of postmodern attitudes, Ellen Dissanayake, in her treatise on Darwinist aesthetics, Homo Aestheticus, responds:

“Much of art today is like the display of a captive lone peacock vainly performed for human spectators, or the following by baby geese of a bicycle wheel instead of their mother. When an animal is removed from its natural milieu and deprived of the cues and circumstances to which it is designed by nature to respond it will behave as best it can but probably in errant ways or reference to aberrant cues and circumstances.”

As Peter Kaniaris, a professor of painting at Anderson University in South Carolina, so cogently observed in an essay titled The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor:

“Rooted in the practice of art is an ancient metaphor: that art is (at its core) an irreducibly visual experience; its “language” and knowledge are unique; its outcomes are like no other outcomes; its value is intrinsically bound to its means. It is a foundational experience that has its origins in the visual impulse, the innate human desire to communicate through visual means. It is the ancient metaphor at work, as old and deep as the paintings of Lascaux.”

Because Kinkade’s name appears in our panel’s title, I will discuss his works before I conclude today. However, I am confident that both he and his work are utterly extraneous to Weintraub’s thesis. What is actually is at the core the essay in question is the ubiquitous promotion of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the continued dissemination of the anti-rational program of postmodern theory where “the meaning of a work of art “is never clear, sufficient, or inherent” but “is always suspended and deferred,” and “what is present in an artist’s mind...does not appear...” in a work of art.

Although my educational training does not qualify me to single-handedly challenge the philosophical premises underlying postmodernism, there are highly qualified experts who can and do. Among them is a renowned philosopher at the University of Miami, Susan Haack who describes the postmodern intellectual climate in less than glowing terms.

“When sham and fake reasoning is ubiquitous, people become uncomfortably aware, or half-aware, that reputations are made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work, as often by mutual promotion as by merit”

With the support of arcane postmodern theory Marcel Duchamp has become the patron saint of contemporary culture practice, revered for having severed the link between visual perceptual experience and the inherent value of a work of art. Although this “sterilization of the visual” has roots dating back to Plato’s idealism, the current curricular antagonism between visual and verbal forms of knowledge is Duchamp’s legacy.

Dollar signs, Andy Warhol

One outstanding characteristic of pro-Duchampian, anti-Darwinian N’artists is their distain for using their own hands to create their work. This dismissive attitude is traceable directly to Duchamp who stated that he considered the execution of his ideas to be a boring activity. From the early 60’s when Warhol began his excursions into Duchampian Neo-Dada, we see a long history of postmodern artists outsourcing the execution of the work. While some might find this Duchampian conceptual provocation to be entertainingly rebellious, it has, in fact, led to a wholesale de-skilling of the artist and a dematerialization of the art object and, as such, is utterly antithetical to the cross-cultural definitions of art traceable back to the Pleistocene era. These long-standing definitions privilege art that requires specialized skill, contains emotional content, and gains significance from its place in the traditions of art.

In such an environment it was inevitable that once Duchampian anti-art usurped the role of high-art that it would spawn superficial imitators who, while having no interest in the philosophical provocations of Duchamp, were nonetheless extremely savvy at taking advantage of the aesthetic vacuum that Duchamp created.

His frequently reported bouts of public drunkenness were recently substantiated when he was arrested for driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol. While I don’t ordinarily subscribe to exposing  personal shortcomings in the context of evaluating an artist’s work but given the fact that Kinkade’s personal message of tranquility, joy, peace, love, doctrinal morality, and God’s importance in one’s life are central to the promotion of his paintings, his character and behavior, sadly, simultaneously provide insights into his lack of personal and artistic integrity.

So, in answer to Linda Weintraub’s proposition, I do not want either Duchampian intellectual provocations or the formulaic “feel-good” visual Valium of Thomas Kinkade to infect my painting students. They are personae non gratae because the task of teaching students to care, of encouraging them to feel, of demonstrating the joy and satisfaction that comes from being constructive rather than deconstructive, of providing them the tools to actively respond to experiences that are beautiful and alive, and of instructing them on how to draw, paint, and compose is too challenging, too important, and too time consuming to allow their life affirming learning experience to be obscured and diluted by two mutually exclusive but equally destructive streams of virulent kitsch.