Speaker 1: Also Media.
Speaker 2: Oh Man, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. You know,
Speaker 2: this is part two of our episodes on Thomas Kincaid
Speaker 2: with Randy Millholland of Something Positive and in between recording episodes.
Speaker 2: We usually do both parts on the same day, and
Speaker 2: we'll always have a break in between so we can
Speaker 2: grab a little bit of lunch, you know, just have
Speaker 2: some minutes without the headset on, you know, recharge. This time,
Speaker 2: I sat down and I wrote an eighty six hundred
Speaker 2: words short story where Hitler and John Wayne Gacy saw
Speaker 2: a series of murders in nineteen eighties New Orleans. And
Speaker 2: you know, I'm gonna be honest, I'm having some mixed
Speaker 2: feelings about it turned out more erotic than I had
Speaker 2: initially intended, and I think largely honestly, Randy, I think
Speaker 2: I mostly used it as a vehicle to express a
Speaker 2: lot of my anger at the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 3: I think that was all expected from Ember one. Like,
Speaker 3: I'm surprised it's not more erotic. Yeah. Yeah. There would
Speaker 3: have been like a heaving scene where they talked about manhood, and.
Speaker 2: I had to cut that because the Hitler gives a
Speaker 2: speech about the gold standard at the sight of the
Speaker 2: second murder that I really felt gone across something important.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna put it up on my substack, Sophie. Well,
Speaker 2: we'll get it out there for all the listeners.
Speaker 1: He's the audience that you've written a thing and then
Speaker 1: not read it.
Speaker 2: Sophie, you're not allowed to podcast the opinions I have
Speaker 2: about the Federal Reserve. They'll come for me, They'll come
Speaker 2: for all of us.
Speaker 3: Oh can I design the cover for this book at least?
Speaker 2: Please? Please?
Speaker 1: I'm enjoying our role over here. You're trying, you're trying
Speaker 1: to save our jobs, and I'm trying to provoke you.
Speaker 2: Sophie. I know you feel the same. That's the why
Speaker 2: we're business partners. You're just as angry at the Fed
Speaker 2: as I have. You know, you've been voting for Ron
Speaker 2: Paul for years before he was even in office, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: and we still write him in every year, for every
Speaker 2: for every position. You know, every county commissioner, Ron Ball,
Speaker 2: but for me, Rochel, Doccatcher, Ron Paul.
Speaker 1: But for me, Ron Paul isn't a man. He's really
Speaker 1: just a friendly cat.
Speaker 2: Well, Ron Paul kind of I think exists above and
Speaker 2: beyond the concept of sexuality, which is why he's so erotic. Anyway, Randy,
Speaker 2: are you ready to learn more about Thomas Kinkaid?
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm terrified to learn more about Thomas Kinkaid. I'll
Speaker 3: be honest with you. You should be. He's gonna go downhill
Speaker 3: real fucking best.
Speaker 2: It definitely will. We're back. Thomas started becoming a household
Speaker 2: name in the early to mid nineteen nineties, a time
Speaker 2: when collectibles were taking off in a big way. As
Speaker 2: we talked about last episode, this is the decade again,
Speaker 2: Pokemon match with Gathering. There's this whole new subculture, and
Speaker 2: Thomas is aware of all this, and he's aware that
Speaker 2: I think I think part of what he's aware of
Speaker 2: is if you're a zoomer, you won't remember this, but
Speaker 2: millennials in the audience will recall every time you had
Speaker 2: Magic or Pokemon or you know, and Masters the Universe toys,
Speaker 2: some new collectible craze take off. There'd be a chunk
Speaker 2: of the Christian right telling everyone that this was the devil,
Speaker 2: that like, this was Satan trying to get his hands
Speaker 2: on our children. And I kind of think the fear
Speaker 2: at Ferby's too right, and I d and d you know,
Speaker 2: which is less of a collectibles thing, but it still
Speaker 2: kind of speaks to the mood at the time. And
Speaker 2: this is not something I've heard anyone else. Right, Maybe
Speaker 2: I'm wrong about this, but I kind of suspect part
Speaker 2: of what Thomas is consciously doing here is recognizing, well,
Speaker 2: for a wide variety of reasons, evangelical Christians cannot or
Speaker 2: don't feel comfortable buying into these other sort of collectible things.
Speaker 2: But they're they're people like anyone else. Whatever thing in
Speaker 2: the human brain gets ticked by collecting a bunch of shit.
Speaker 2: They have that too. I just have to provide them
Speaker 2: with something that's safe, right, And I do kind of
Speaker 2: suspect that that's what he's doing, especially when yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: because it's such the same thing, the artificially restricting the selection, right,
Speaker 2: the trying to get people to hoard stuff, convincing them
Speaker 2: these are investment vehicles. And he would also this is
Speaker 2: kind of where things get fun. He started spreading insane
Speaker 2: rumors about the links that he would go to to
Speaker 2: make sure that his highlighted art pieces were like worth collecting,
Speaker 2: that nobody was getting a fake, right, then you were
Speaker 2: getting an original. Thomas Kincaid print, if you bought a
Speaker 2: Thomas Kincaid print that a real person had like slapped
Speaker 2: a little bit of paint on a tree. For most
Speaker 2: additions were supposedly signed with ink that contained Thomas's DNA
Speaker 2: from either his hair or his blood to quote to
Speaker 2: prevent fakes, which I love because the insinuation here is
Speaker 2: that some of the thirty thousand dollars millionaires buying his
Speaker 2: art could afford to have the signature DNA tested somehow
Speaker 2: if they needed to prove that their Thomas Kincaid was
Speaker 2: an original, Like, where are people going to get that
Speaker 2: test done? Thomas? How are they you doing this?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, does Thomas Kinkaid have something in common kiss?
Speaker 3: Because it was a whole story about them mixing their
Speaker 3: blood the ink for their Marvel comic.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I honestly I think that more artists should
Speaker 2: do this, right, Like, when you get it, you should
Speaker 2: be able to listen to not just the normal edition
Speaker 2: of this podcast, right, that's for poor people. If you're
Speaker 2: if you're a man of means, you should be able
Speaker 2: to buy the exclusive edition of this podcast, which comes
Speaker 2: with a vial of either my blood or my hair.
Speaker 2: You know, you never know what you're gonna get, but
Speaker 2: something that was once a part of me, you know,
Speaker 2: and all you have to pay. It's Sophie, it's just
Speaker 2: twenty two thousand dollars an episode. That's a bargain anyway.
Speaker 2: It's a collectionatile everybody guaranteed to appreciate.
Speaker 3: You're going to get them off anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: Toenails ever wax.
Speaker 2: You know a special benefit for our online listeners who
Speaker 2: are crazy rich people with money. Every time you buying
Speaker 2: an exclusive Behind the Bastard's premier Collector's edition episode, you
Speaker 2: get three minutes of Hitler and John Wayne Gacy solving
Speaker 2: crimes in nineteen eighties New Orleans. Collect them all to
Speaker 2: get the whole story.
Speaker 1: You sickos that heard Robert say things about hair and
Speaker 1: toenails and thought, ooh, I would want that to yourself.
Speaker 2: I'm going to stay off the subreddit this week.
Speaker 1: Don't post anything we did, stay.
Speaker 2: Off the internet.
Speaker 1: My mom always just keep that on the inside like
Speaker 1: a winner.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so critics.
Speaker 3: Honest, any rich person who's listening to your podcast is
Speaker 3: probably just getting ideas on what they're going to do
Speaker 3: with their wealth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't know how many of these twenty
Speaker 2: two thousand dollars collectors Edition episodes we're going to sell.
Speaker 2: Critics continue to dog his work, continue to dog his
Speaker 2: work somehow the whole I put my own blood and
Speaker 2: my signature on these prints didn't win them back. But
Speaker 2: as he grew older and richer, he got better at
Speaker 2: striking back at them, as this segment from an article
Speaker 2: in Salon makes clear. And in nearly every encounter with
Speaker 2: the press, Kincaid delivered a diatribe against the art world
Speaker 2: establishment that had shut him out. They were elites touting
Speaker 2: unfathomable down or junk to hard working people who needed uplift. Instead,
Speaker 2: art snobs were the esthetic counterparts of the so called
Speaker 2: liberal elites. So he's doing culture war stuff with his
Speaker 2: two like your which is again he's he's not unique
Speaker 2: in this. That's really starting on the right in the nineties.
Speaker 2: To a significant degree, people are finding out how to
Speaker 2: monetize the culture war. But he's kind of the first
Speaker 2: guy to mix that with like the collectibles industry, which
Speaker 2: I find interesting. Right, you are participating in a culture
Speaker 2: war against leftist intellectuals by buying my prints.
Speaker 3: Its back to the whole vandals, they how many evangelis Like,
Speaker 3: you know the world is against you, but like here
Speaker 3: I'm with you. Now buy this prayer Vile of.
Speaker 2: Water, right, yeah, exactly. Now. I should note here that
Speaker 2: one time Thomas said of Pablo Picasso he had talent
Speaker 2: but didn't use it in a significant way.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, what what a wild man to say that about? Yeah, Manna,
Speaker 4: not really much not not a lot of talent being
Speaker 4: used there, right, he kind of half passed his way
Speaker 4: through that that piece of.
Speaker 2: Art, that's century defining.
Speaker 3: Piece of art.
Speaker 4: That's stunning, That is amazing, amazing, am that's like.
Speaker 3: Bob Denver knocking down sl oh my god, like some
Speaker 3: major actor.
Speaker 2: Oh god, It's like it's like he's talking about like
Speaker 2: some jazz musician who put out like one really great
Speaker 2: album and then like overdose or something where it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's a tragedy that he didn't, like, you know, master
Speaker 2: his demons and make more art. But like Pablo Picasso
Speaker 2: made a lot of very influential art. What are you talking.
Speaker 3: About across mediums?
Speaker 2: Yes, Jesus, what a what a wild thing to say.
Speaker 2: I had a great experience like ten fifteen years back
Speaker 2: at a Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Intel and Nokia
Speaker 2: bought out the Picasso Museum for like a party, and
Speaker 2: so it was just like you're just kind of like
Speaker 2: walking through and on the walls are just like these
Speaker 2: these like draw like sketches that he had done too,
Speaker 2: including a bunch of him like having sex with his girlfriend,
Speaker 2: which I felt like, oh, I don't know, should they
Speaker 2: should this be up on the should this be up
Speaker 2: on the wall of a well? Like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: that's not it's that creepy for you to draw depict
Speaker 2: your own relationship with somebody. It's kind of weird as
Speaker 2: the people running the museum to be like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: we should stick this up on the wall. Like, I
Speaker 2: don't know, man, that's a little private to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think I need to see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does a good job of depicting what the
Speaker 2: beard looks like in that situation. If you're really curious that,
Speaker 2: you can learn a lot about good pretty good. These
Speaker 2: were These were all not thrusting pictures, I'll say that
Speaker 2: much about them. Anyway, It was a it was a
Speaker 2: fun time, Yeah, you could say that. So in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, kay kN Kay took light. How I wonder
Speaker 2: what can kate? No, I don't. In nineteen No, he's
Speaker 2: about to He's going to sexually harass people later in
Speaker 2: this episode.
Speaker 3: Oh god, damn.
Speaker 2: I was gonna say Picasso would never, but Picasso probably did.
Speaker 3: I'm actually rather sure that he There's some some things
Speaker 3: about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, almost certainly. In nineteen ninety four, Kincaid took Lighthouse
Speaker 2: Publishing public. It was initially very successful, raking in millions
Speaker 2: of dollars and shooting up the value of the stock
Speaker 2: to something like twenty or twenty five dollars a share.
Speaker 2: At its height, Kinkaid became the only working artist to,
Speaker 2: in Sue Orleans words, be a small cap equid issue. Right,
Speaker 2: he is this is unique, Like it's not unique for
Speaker 2: artists to like commercialize, but the way that he does it,
Speaker 2: he's the only guy doing it this way. Ye. Late
Speaker 2: later in nineteen ninety four, he is named Artist of
Speaker 2: the Year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers,
Speaker 2: evidence that he had been spotted and appreciated by the
Speaker 2: sort of people who are making a fortune on the
Speaker 2: burgeoning collectible culture. Business Week named Lighthouse a hot growth
Speaker 2: company in nineteen ninety five, and from nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 2: to mid two thousand and five, Kincaid earned an eyewatering
Speaker 2: total of fifty three million dollars for his work. This
Speaker 2: included almost twelve million dollars for these studio proofs that
Speaker 2: he retouched with highlights. Nice work if you can make.
Speaker 3: It, if you if you find the suckers with the money.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know what to say. Like, I
Speaker 3: see nothing wrong with becoming rich off your work. I
Speaker 3: see everyone's cap selling your stuff out there, But I
Speaker 3: do hate the whole like grift part of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's definitely a degree of evil here. At the
Speaker 2: same time, if you have a chance to make fifty
Speaker 2: three million dollars painting trees on a canvas, who's not
Speaker 2: going to do that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Like who would?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I could make a bunch of prints of Popeye
Speaker 3: and make extra money by just painting the pipe on
Speaker 3: him afterwards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, doing a little dash of brown first media.
Speaker 3: I promise I will not be doing that, Please don't.
Speaker 3: I might.
Speaker 2: I might, though, if you want to see me paint
Speaker 2: some pipes, you know, or paint once we get that
Speaker 2: Hitler Gayy art, you know, I could do a little
Speaker 2: I could do a little dollop a dollar a color
Speaker 2: on there, twelve million dollars.
Speaker 1: Stop printing it.
Speaker 2: It'll appreciate, Sophie. It's going to make the money. This
Speaker 2: is a great investment vehicle. You know, cash out your
Speaker 2: four one. We always go, you know, we always go
Speaker 2: fifty to fifty. Listen and I'm very pro cash out
Speaker 2: your four oh one ks and pick up some of
Speaker 2: our erotic hitler gayy art. You know, it's the it's
Speaker 2: the Bitcoin of the twenty twenties.
Speaker 3: God, I feel like he bought these prints with paint
Speaker 3: on them. Are the same people who probably as ex
Speaker 3: silently by the Trump dollars yes yeah, or the Trump
Speaker 3: teddy bears.
Speaker 2: These one hundred percent of his customers have since gotten
Speaker 2: caught up in a scam where they bought five hundred
Speaker 2: dollars Trump bills, and or or they are collecting Iraqi
Speaker 2: dinars waiting for Trump to get back in and revalue
Speaker 2: them like they are all born marks. That is that
Speaker 2: is who he profits off of. That's why there's one
Speaker 2: of these in every ten houses.
Speaker 3: Just really love the Gold advertiser.
Speaker 2: Oh God, we all love Gold. I mean it's again
Speaker 2: a great investment. Vehicle only goes up. Don't look at
Speaker 2: don't don't look into that. So as the business went on,
Speaker 2: Kincaid proved himself a savvy innovator. The people he brought
Speaker 2: on to advise his company once it started making millions
Speaker 2: of dollars seemed to have felt he was walking a tightrope,
Speaker 2: providing art that looked original and unique, but wasn't original
Speaker 2: and unique in any sense. That mattered when Thomas told
Speaker 2: them he wanted to start offering different sizes of print
Speaker 2: and versions of his prints in limited products like mugs
Speaker 2: and lazy boy lounge chairs. Seriously, they hit lazy boy chairs. Yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah them. Yeah, I think like a or like a
Speaker 2: a what you'm gonna call it a landscape? Yeah, that
Speaker 2: sounds like a nightmare. I don't want to wake up
Speaker 2: surrounded by Thomas Kincaid art.
Speaker 3: This is reminded me of kiss again, Like, don't forget
Speaker 3: to get your Thomas Kinkaid coffin.
Speaker 2: These are not They're not very different people in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways. I think Jeene Simmons is a lot
Speaker 2: more honest because I'll say this, Thomas always pretends to
Speaker 2: not be the kind of guy he is Gene Simmons
Speaker 2: is pretty much the kind of guy he is. Right,
Speaker 2: One thing you can't say when you hear ugly stuff
Speaker 2: about Gene Simmons, you can't pretend he misled me. Right,
Speaker 2: It's like I kind always knew you were a piece
Speaker 2: of shit.
Speaker 3: Ge. You feel like it's likely to be around you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I would have to take a shower shaking
Speaker 2: your hand. I just know that about you. So anyway,
Speaker 2: his investors, Kincaid's investors, when he starts putting out lazy
Speaker 2: boy chairs, are like, well, this, what if this devalues
Speaker 2: all the prints you're putting out. He's supposed to be
Speaker 2: investment vehicles. People are supposed to supposed to be serious art.
Speaker 2: This might make it look cheap. Uh and Kencaid replied,
Speaker 2: fuck you, motherfuckers and whipped out his dick. I mean,
Speaker 2: not like literally with respect that, but also he kind
Speaker 2: of did literally because Thomas Kinkaid was the kind of
Speaker 2: guy who liked to assert his dominance in social situations,
Speaker 2: particularly business settings, by pissing on stuff. This is a
Speaker 2: regular thing in his career, so he didn't kind of
Speaker 2: whip his dick out on them, right, Yeah, I used
Speaker 2: to know.
Speaker 3: He reenacted the bathroom scene from Wolf.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I used to know kind
Speaker 2: of like mid level drug lord, lower mid level drug
Speaker 2: lord who would do that whenever he showed up at
Speaker 2: a site. Is just like whip his dick out and
Speaker 2: start pissing all over the ground in front of the
Speaker 2: farm or something. You know. It's just that there's some
Speaker 2: guys who just have that in them that need to
Speaker 2: like this will this will somehow gain me a benefit
Speaker 2: in the situation. I prefer the uh I got this
Speaker 2: from the old upright Citizens Brigade, but the ass Pennies idea,
Speaker 2: that one works a lot better. You know, look that
Speaker 2: one up kids, Look up the ass Penny sketch. If
Speaker 2: you ain't seen it.
Speaker 3: When my Chather was tuned, if I wasn't giving her
Speaker 3: enough attention, she would just you know, pull her trainers
Speaker 3: off and peel on the floor. Made sure I saw it.
Speaker 3: And that's what makes me think of like, did no
Speaker 3: one put kinkaid in a corner or time out?
Speaker 2: And don't maybe it because you're right, having spent time
Speaker 2: around a little kid, now it is one of the
Speaker 2: like one of the first levers that you learn as
Speaker 2: a little person. You can play. Is like, well, if
Speaker 2: I am not getting the attention I need, they have
Speaker 2: to pay attention if I start pissing on some Yeah,
Speaker 2: Thomas Kinkaid is just kind of stuck in that two
Speaker 2: year old stage. So for an example of how this
Speaker 2: kind of went, in the late nineteen nineties, he held
Speaker 2: a company gathering at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. According
Speaker 2: to the Huffington Post quote, this one's for you, Walt
Speaker 2: the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on
Speaker 2: a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Shephard, a former
Speaker 2: vice president for Kincaid's company, in an interview.
Speaker 1: Cross, sir, gross, all the.
Speaker 2: Things to piss on Winnie the Pooh.
Speaker 3: And again, I would like to reiterate Kincaid's company currently
Speaker 3: has a license with Disney and does Disney Prince, Marvel Prince,
Speaker 3: and Star Wars Prince.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also he's called the Pooh and the pet it, right, Thomas, you.
Speaker 2: Do have to pay an extra fifty percent for one
Speaker 2: of the Winnie the Pooh prints that he pissed on.
Speaker 2: Those are a dwindling commodity. Now tragedy since signature now
Speaker 2: this incident him pissing on the pooh came up in
Speaker 2: a court case. That's why we know it. So this
Speaker 2: vice president had to tell this story under oath, and
Speaker 2: when Thomas was questioned about it, he told the truth
Speaker 2: and described that he was. He said that basically, this
Speaker 2: isn't a thing I did just once I am drawn
Speaker 2: to quote ritual territory marking. Wow, very funny.
Speaker 3: So does he own the one hundred day for when now?
Speaker 3: Because he wayne the poo to serve as dominance, I don't.
Speaker 3: That's how it works.
Speaker 2: That how works, that's how that's how he got ownership
Speaker 2: of it from AA NILM. That old fucker just couldn't
Speaker 2: fight back, didn't have a strong his prostates been swollen
Speaker 2: up since World War One, so he can't even he
Speaker 2: can't even get a good stream. It's hard to fight
Speaker 2: when you were well, yeah that too.
Speaker 1: So that's girls.
Speaker 3: Yeah we are.
Speaker 2: Don't don't be judgmental. Don't be judgmental. You know, the
Speaker 2: world needs all kinds. Without people peeing on plants, how
Speaker 2: will they get enough nitrogen? I think it's nitrogen anyway.
Speaker 3: I don't think that that's good for plants.
Speaker 2: It's good for some stuff, you know. Anyway, here's ads
Speaker 2: ah we're back. We're thinking about peeing on things.
Speaker 1: No, always time you are, that's you, that's your.
Speaker 2: I'm going to go I'm going to go out of
Speaker 2: the woods today and pee on some stuff, Sophie. So
Speaker 2: for a while the times were good, at least for
Speaker 2: Kincaid and his close and his closest allies. But their
Speaker 2: fortune was entirely reliant upon having a healthy garden of
Speaker 2: marks to keep funneling the money up. Because again, this
Speaker 2: is basically an MLM or a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm
Speaker 2: not talking about most of his customers here. Most of
Speaker 2: them are misled by the sales pitch, as is the
Speaker 2: case with multi level marketing. Though the big money for
Speaker 2: Kincaid isn't in individual sales. It's in convincing people who
Speaker 2: have startup capital to go in and invest in starting
Speaker 2: a gallery to sell your shit.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's the part of this that really does look most
Speaker 2: like a pyramid scheme, right, because while Lighthouse is a
Speaker 2: public company, each Kincaid's signature gallery is a business owned
Speaker 2: by private operators, much like a McDonald's. Much of Thomas's
Speaker 2: work outside of painting was selling himself to the people
Speaker 2: who wanted to own Galleries. One of these people, last
Speaker 2: name Spinello, later claimed in court that Kincaid's personal life
Speaker 2: story was a big part of the sales pitch. Quote.
Speaker 2: We were told success story after success story, and of
Speaker 2: course the Tom story and his Christian views and the
Speaker 2: way he runs his life. So these are like old
Speaker 2: retirees who have banked a few million and are being
Speaker 2: told like, oh, this nice Christian man is giving us
Speaker 2: a chance to really increase our wealth. He wouldn't lie
Speaker 2: to us. Look at what a good Christian he is now.
Speaker 2: Of course, like any man with this much money, Thomas
Speaker 2: was not living the chast and sober life of a
Speaker 2: monk from an article in the La Times quote. In
Speaker 2: testimony and interviews with The Times, Shepherd and other former
Speaker 2: employees said they often went with Kincaid to strip clubs
Speaker 2: and bars, where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control.
Speaker 2: John Dandoy Media Arts Groups, senior director of retail operations
Speaker 2: from nighteen ninety five to nineteen ninety nine, testified in
Speaker 2: a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyl
Speaker 2: and Hyde character whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.
Speaker 2: Tom would be fine, He would be drinking, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden you couldn't tell where the boundary was.
Speaker 2: And then he became very incoherent, and he would start
Speaker 2: cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff. Dan doy,
Speaker 2: who left the company to become chief executive of a
Speaker 2: group of galleries owned by Kincaid's brother, recounted that about
Speaker 2: six years ago, the artist was so intoxicated during a
Speaker 2: performance by Siegfried and Roy and Las Vegas that people
Speaker 2: seated nearby moved away from him. I think it was
Speaker 2: roy Er, Siegfried or whatever had a cod piece on
Speaker 2: his leotards. Dan Deys testified, and so when the show started,
Speaker 2: Tom just started yelling cod peace, God, Peace, and had
Speaker 2: to be quieted by his mother and wife.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was like that uncle everyone has.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's your drunkll he's heckling Sigfried and Roy.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: That one's more or less. Look, I have I heckled
Speaker 2: floor shows in Las Vegas while too drunk to be controlled. Yes,
Speaker 2: do I do it every time? Absolutely? You know? Would
Speaker 2: I have done that to Sigfried and Roy? Possibly? You know,
Speaker 2: That's not why we're angry. I just thought it was
Speaker 2: a funny story.
Speaker 3: So I'm amazed. Also, there are women out there who
Speaker 3: can say they gave lap dances.
Speaker 2: To Thomas kinkad to the painter of light, which is
Speaker 2: a trademark. By the way, you can't call yourself the
Speaker 2: painter of light, only him.
Speaker 3: I want to see a Thomas Kinka painting which a
Speaker 3: beautiful country lan that nice missed in the morning and
Speaker 3: the sun breaking through like the orange and red clouds
Speaker 3: on a strip club, just a side of.
Speaker 2: The road, yeahing from the inside nowhere strip club with
Speaker 2: like a little Thomas Kinkaid out front, smoking a cigarette
Speaker 2: and thinking about how his life went so wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 2: why his wife won't return his phone calls. That's the
Speaker 2: art we need. So for a while his wife Nannette,
Speaker 2: was able to exercise partial control over Tom when they
Speaker 2: were together, but as the years went on, Thomas traveled
Speaker 2: constantly for business. His gaalerries sold unevenly most of the year,
Speaker 2: but they always received huge bursts of sales, sometimes hundreds
Speaker 2: in a day, with lines out the block when he
Speaker 2: showed up to give a talk and personally highlight pieces.
Speaker 2: So he would have to travel around to galleries in
Speaker 2: order to keep sales going, and this leads to him
Speaker 2: being away from his wife and being away from any
Speaker 2: kind of like moderating aspects on his behavior, which leads
Speaker 2: to him partying constantly. And this company culture where the
Speaker 2: employees who work for Thomas directly, like the Master Highlighters
Speaker 2: and his business managers and marketing people, come to view
Speaker 2: Thomas as something of a god, and his backstory is
Speaker 2: like this sacred text because he's he's worshiped. Whenever he
Speaker 2: shows up at one of these places, he has fans
Speaker 2: lining up out the door, so you can't really think
Speaker 2: of him as this normal person. There's almost this like
Speaker 2: derangement that goes on for the people working beneath him.
Speaker 2: And there's this this kind of cultic belief system that
Speaker 2: springs up within the Kincaid company itself, which is embodied
Speaker 2: by one of his business managers talking to the Guardian
Speaker 2: here and saying, quote, there's over forty walls in the
Speaker 2: average American home, and Tom says, our job is to
Speaker 2: figure out how to populate every single wall in every
Speaker 2: single home and every business throughout the world with his paintings,
Speaker 2: which is a deranged thing to say and want, but
Speaker 2: it does. It does. Thomas Kincaid walked so that AI
Speaker 2: fucking image generators could run.
Speaker 3: Right. Also, this is something el Ron Hubbard shit.
Speaker 2: It is right that like there's something This is a
Speaker 2: big part of the narrative too, that like there's something
Speaker 2: healing about our paintings. People need them. And so you
Speaker 2: know the fact that Thomas himself is this messy drunk
Speaker 2: who does not live the actual life he pretends to live.
Speaker 2: The fact that we're charging an arm and a leg
Speaker 2: for these is justified because these are making the world better.
Speaker 1: Companies that you dribbled one dot of paint.
Speaker 2: On, Yes, yes, yes, these are part of healing the
Speaker 2: planet and bringing it back to God, as one line
Speaker 2: from a company Brocher noted. And the often hurried, unsympathetic
Speaker 2: and complex world we live in, the images Thomas Kinkaid
Speaker 2: paints offer a place of refuge, a place where the
Speaker 2: transient things of life give away to the things that
Speaker 2: matter most, faith and family, a loving home, and the
Speaker 2: people who know and love us. Now this all sounds
Speaker 2: patently silly, just an obvious, soulless grift, but Kincaid's work
Speaker 2: really touched a huge number of people. The fact that
Speaker 2: I think they were wrong to be touched by what
Speaker 2: was a patent soulless grift by a man who did
Speaker 2: not believe the things he pretended to say to them
Speaker 2: didn't matter, right. And I gotta say one of the
Speaker 2: few people who try to grapple with this and do
Speaker 2: a really good job of it was was Joan Didion
Speaker 2: who wrote this about Thomas Kinkaid. The passion with which
Speaker 2: buyer approached these Kincaid images was hard to define. The
Speaker 2: manager of one California gallery that handled them told me
Speaker 2: that it was not unusual to sell six or seven
Speaker 2: at a clip to buyers who already owned ten or twenty,
Speaker 2: and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought the
Speaker 2: viewing of the images a sizeable emotional weight. Right. These
Speaker 2: are these are early super fans, and there's a there's
Speaker 2: a degree of what you're going to see in trump
Speaker 2: Ism where once it comes out the kind of lifestyle
Speaker 2: he really lives, it doesn't affect his fan base at all.
Speaker 2: They don't care because what they need is not the
Speaker 2: reality of Thomas Kincaid. They need this like fantasy of
Speaker 2: who and what he is and what his art represents,
Speaker 2: and he's not a necessary part of that past. A
Speaker 2: certain point.
Speaker 3: Well, it's like that with most like conservative Christian troops,
Speaker 3: Like look Jerry fallwell you know what happened, and he
Speaker 3: still had people. Fuck yeah, Jim Baker still has a career.
Speaker 3: He would write prison.
Speaker 2: He literally went to prison. And it's I like Didion's
Speaker 2: criticism because she actually she actually looks into what's going on,
Speaker 2: like what is the actual meaning being transmitted beyond kind
Speaker 2: of the surface with his paintings in a way that
Speaker 2: is not like the snooty high art criticisms of his work.
Speaker 2: Didion drills down into some of the reasons his art
Speaker 2: is upsetting better than anyone else I can really think of.
Speaker 2: And when she's doing this, she kind of One of
Speaker 2: the things she brings up is this year two thousand
Speaker 2: post on Concaid's website where he writes about a trip
Speaker 2: to the Yosemite Valley quote, when my family wandered through
Speaker 2: the National Park Center, I discovered a key to my fantasy,
Speaker 2: a recreation of a Millwok Indian village. When I returned
Speaker 2: to my studio began to work on the mountains. Declare
Speaker 2: his glory a poetic expression of what I felt at
Speaker 2: that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I
Speaker 2: even added a Millwok Indian camp across the river as
Speaker 2: an affirmation that man has its place, has his place
Speaker 2: even in a setting touched by God's glory. Now, before
Speaker 2: we get into yeah in this Thamaskin Gade painting, before
Speaker 2: we get into Jones breakdown of why this is fucked up. First,
Speaker 2: here's the painting itself, right, you see, you get the mountains, sunset,
Speaker 2: lot of light playing through them. It looks like maybe
Speaker 2: an early fall image. You've got a couple of very
Speaker 2: stereotypical looking teepees there. Oh god, yeah, Now it's a
Speaker 2: I gotta say, I did look into this. It's a
Speaker 2: you know, it's an idyllic image right inoffensive on its face.
Speaker 2: But I will say the structures that he puts, you know,
Speaker 2: in the hands of the Milwak is not entirely wrong.
Speaker 2: He seems to have based this on an actual display
Speaker 2: at Yosemite, so he doesn't get this totally you know, incorrect.
Speaker 2: It is true, it is. It is worth pointing out
Speaker 2: the more common shelters used by the Midwak. We're what
Speaker 2: they called umotka, which is a conical barkhouse lined with
Speaker 2: pine needles. And layered outside with earth. Uh, and the
Speaker 2: Kocha which is a semi subterranean dwelling, and a lot
Speaker 2: of their the sun shelters that were kind of more temporary,
Speaker 2: rectangular and flat topped. But they did have shelters that
Speaker 2: looked kind of like this. So I will say his
Speaker 2: depiction is not like like, it's not super He didn't
Speaker 2: just like draw a random TP, you know, and this
Speaker 2: is not a tribe that used anything like that. I
Speaker 2: think he based it off of a dediction of a
Speaker 2: million research at least. So yeah, I think he was
Speaker 2: just inspired by a thing that had done some base
Speaker 2: research and that probably explains it. But I did look
Speaker 2: into it because I wanted to know, like, did he
Speaker 2: just throw a TP on there because you know? Uh?
Speaker 2: And no that that that apparently is not wrong. So good, good,
Speaker 2: That's one mark. There's one mark there, right. But Joan
Speaker 2: does a really good job of explaining what is messed
Speaker 2: up here, affirming that man has his place in the
Speaker 2: Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park visitor centers
Speaker 2: recreation of a Milwok Indian village is identifiable as a
Speaker 2: doubtful enterprise on many levels. Not the least of which
Speaker 2: being that the Yosemite Millwalk were forcibly run onto a
Speaker 2: reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush and allowed to
Speaker 2: return to Yosemite only in eighteen fifty five. In other words,
Speaker 2: Kinkaid is commercviialized a moment from the past in the
Speaker 2: same way that this land was commercialized at a different,
Speaker 2: you know point with you know, in a much more
Speaker 2: violent way, and is kind of only capable of commercializing
Speaker 2: this moment that ignores the complexity and the pain in
Speaker 2: that history, right, because there's no room for complexity or
Speaker 2: pain in his art, Right. We just have this kind
Speaker 2: of idyllic portrayal of a village that he's stuck on
Speaker 2: something that's supposed to go on some boomer's wall in
Speaker 2: their like retirement home in Scottsdale.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's a further kind of commodification of that.
Speaker 3: That's like seeing a painting of a gorgeous field in
Speaker 3: a path, like, oh, that's the trial tears.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're kind of you're it's just kind of
Speaker 2: like ignoring what is more. I don't know, it's it's
Speaker 2: a very Kincaid thing to do. Uh. It is fair
Speaker 2: to say Now, the best criticism I found of his
Speaker 2: work came from a blog. Here's what's left from two
Speaker 2: thousand and five. The writer, identified as Michael is someone
Speaker 2: with a passing interest in art history who I think
Speaker 2: might have come from the evangelical background. And he he
Speaker 2: compares this piece by concaid that we started the episode with. Right,
Speaker 2: you've got the cross up on the hill. You've got
Speaker 2: that big bright sunlight, you know, illuminating it with the
Speaker 2: painting that lightly inspired it by nineteenth century German painter
Speaker 2: Caspar David Friedrich. It's called the Cross on the Mountain.
Speaker 2: Now you can just see right there. Yes, these are
Speaker 2: very different artworks and they're quality. There's even as someone there.
Speaker 3: Like some anguish to it, like the crowds. You can
Speaker 3: make gard that that's the blood of Christ, right, going
Speaker 3: back to my evangelical childhood. Yeah, you actually have Jesus
Speaker 3: on the cross, right, like the silhouette of the suffering
Speaker 3: and cross.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, yeah, I think those are all really
Speaker 2: good notes and it's worth anything that, like actually putting
Speaker 2: Christ on the cross is a thing that Caspar does
Speaker 2: in another similar work of art, the Cross and the
Speaker 2: Cathedral in the Mountains, and I think Cancaid's work is
Speaker 2: kind of a hybrid of these two. Right. But you
Speaker 2: can see down there the cross in the cathedral in
Speaker 2: the mountains where you've got kind of these, You've got
Speaker 2: like basically this forest and there's a you can see
Speaker 2: a cathedral kind of coming up out of the forest
Speaker 2: in a way that almost makes it look like it's
Speaker 2: grown out of the forest. And again, you could look
Speaker 2: at this as another artist who, like Kincaid, painted the
Speaker 2: same shit over and over again, while he does a
Speaker 2: lot of crosses in the woods, right, But I don't
Speaker 2: really think that's what's happening here. Caspar has something to say.
Speaker 2: He is showing Christianity, and this is something that was
Speaker 2: relevant to the kind of politics within Christianity at the
Speaker 2: time as an outgrowth of the natural world.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Michael in his write up quotes an art expert named
Speaker 2: Christina van Puyen, who says, of the first painting by Caspar,
Speaker 2: the cross stands at the brink of the evening horizon,
Speaker 2: which signifies the disappearance of God from the lives of
Speaker 2: the modern world during the Enlightenment. Yet the burgeoning of
Speaker 2: evergreens near the cross also indicates that a new religion
Speaker 2: is emerging. Colin Eisler has more to say about the
Speaker 2: second painting. Protestantism, conveyed by the vehicle of the visual arts,
Speaker 2: tended to see Nature more as pagan mother than God's work,
Speaker 2: too close to pantheism for comfort. Friedrich presents an exception
Speaker 2: his anti classical emphasis upon experience, its reception and communication
Speaker 2: stress the personal. And I'm not quoting that because I
Speaker 2: am as I like, I'm not religious, I don't believe
Speaker 2: in any of this stuff. But I'm quoting it because
Speaker 2: it's worth noting that with these pictures that clearly inspired
Speaker 2: Thomas's by Caspar, there's a lot to say, There's a
Speaker 2: lot to analyze. There's history wrapped up in that. You
Speaker 2: can you can see pieces of the history of movements
Speaker 2: of huge numbers of people and what they believe represented
Speaker 2: in his art, and there is none of that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The point Michael makes in his criticism is no one
Speaker 2: will ever have this much to say about the meaning
Speaker 2: held within a Kincaid work, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, you're right. It's weird because like you look, thinking
Speaker 3: cad painting next to those, like you know, the paintings,
Speaker 3: there's just again a lot of emotion, use of color
Speaker 3: to to conbay how you're supposed to feel how he
Speaker 3: feels about what's going on, and it's not necessarily bright
Speaker 3: and cheery. But he also let's talk about what's you know,
Speaker 3: this feeling of Christianity, the suffering of Christ et cetera,
Speaker 3: or even like you said, the church growing out of nature.
Speaker 3: And Thenkincaid's like, wow, he painted a lens flare.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he put a lens flare on a cabin. And
Speaker 2: there's also you can s in these two different works
Speaker 2: made at different times, they're clearly the same man, but
Speaker 2: like who has grown and changed over time? Right Like,
Speaker 2: they look different as opposed to every Kincaid painting could
Speaker 2: have been made at the same time, Right Like, it's
Speaker 2: kind of impossible to even even mark out is it
Speaker 2: an early period or a late period. I'm sure there's
Speaker 2: some weird Kincaid historians, but the rest of us aren't
Speaker 2: going to do that, right Yeah, And I guess the
Speaker 2: point I'm making here, and I think the point that
Speaker 2: these critics are making that Jill makes is that kin
Speaker 2: kid all, it's not that what he was doing in
Speaker 2: his art is he's not like purposefully being like racist
Speaker 2: against Native Americans. But the inability of his work to
Speaker 2: ever deal in anything that touches on sadness kind of
Speaker 2: means that he's always going there. There's a shallowness, a
Speaker 2: one sidedness to it that is kind of gross and
Speaker 2: gross and commercial when you are you're touching on something
Speaker 2: where there's a darker history there. Right, But Kinkaid's whole life,
Speaker 2: all he's doing is he's selling emotional morphine.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: There must have been some creative drive in this man
Speaker 2: at some point. There's certainly pain in his.
Speaker 3: True he's a more than confident artist and right do
Speaker 3: what he was doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like, I.
Speaker 3: Don't think again, there's nothing wrong with like, I just
Speaker 3: want to make art that makes people happy in it, Yeah,
Speaker 3: But there's just some things that are kind of hard
Speaker 3: to like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's an it's not just that he wants
Speaker 2: to make them happy, there's an ideology behind what he
Speaker 2: believes will make people right, and that ideology is social conservatism.
Speaker 2: Laura Miller makes this very clear in an article she
Speaker 2: wrote for Salon. Thomas Kinkaid the George W. Bush of Art,
Speaker 2: and that title isn't just her being kind of like
Speaker 2: shitty quote. Hermann Brock maintained that someone who chooses to
Speaker 2: make kitsch is ethically depraved, a criminal, willing, radical evil.
Speaker 2: The novelist Milan Coundera believes kitsch to be the natural
Speaker 2: expression of totalitarianism. That's a lot of moral weight to
Speaker 2: place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings. But Kincaid
Speaker 2: was always the first to present his work as a
Speaker 2: form of ideology. Candera defined kitsch as the absolute denial
Speaker 2: of shit, meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view
Speaker 2: of the world. From that, it doesn't necessarily follow that
Speaker 2: art wallows and shit, but art doesn't exist for the
Speaker 2: primary purpose of denying it either. Kitsch is first and
Speaker 2: foremost a lie. Its very existence is founded on bad faith.
Speaker 2: And the best example of that is the fact that
Speaker 2: Kincaid is an official member of the George W. Bush
Speaker 2: Presidential Prayer Team, from whom he received an award right.
Speaker 2: He is a friend of George W. Bush, He met
Speaker 2: him a number of times, and he's this it's this
Speaker 2: flattening of American culture during this period where we are
Speaker 2: taking a very dark turn, where we are invading two
Speaker 2: countries where there are huge numbers of deaths overseas as
Speaker 2: a result of American action, and ken Kaid sees his
Speaker 2: goal not just to pray for the guy behind a
Speaker 2: lot of it, but to sell people during this time
Speaker 2: when they're scared and upset about the violence that they
Speaker 2: are a part of, to calm them down with these
Speaker 2: anesthetizing pieces of art. Right, he really does see his
Speaker 2: goal as that, right, like, keep pulling the lever and
Speaker 2: voting for Republicans. Here's a nice picture of a cabin.
Speaker 2: Now you can feel comfortable as you like slide off
Speaker 2: into sanylity. Right, that is what Thomas Kinkaid is doing.
Speaker 2: And while he's doing this and portraying himself as this
Speaker 2: upright Christian pinnacle of like you know what the evangelical
Speaker 2: spirit can achieve, he is spending all of his free
Speaker 2: time at strip clubs, drinking and abusing prescription drug drugs.
Speaker 2: He's pissing on shit to show down.
Speaker 3: Oh god, oh yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He's also doing he's fucking, he's mixing like hard liquor
Speaker 2: and valium a lot. And he's also sexually harassing and
Speaker 2: assaulting his employees. In the court cases that we've been
Speaker 2: building to and have quoted from earlier. In this witnesses
Speaker 2: testified as seeing Thomas at one of the many signing
Speaker 2: parties for his paintings. He got so drunk he fell
Speaker 2: off a barstool and per the Huffington Post, palmed a
Speaker 2: startled woman's breast. Then when the wife of a former
Speaker 2: employee tried to help him out up, he cursed her out.
Speaker 2: Now that's an ugly story, but much worse is the
Speaker 2: tale of a company party at a motel in South Bend,
Speaker 2: where Thomas met with a group of signature gallery owners
Speaker 2: to sign a bunch of their prints. This meeting came
Speaker 2: about because Thomas had convinced all these men and women
Speaker 2: to invest their savings into starting galleries for his art.
Speaker 2: He promised themselves and ever escalating profits, and by August
Speaker 2: of two thousand and two, those profits had started to stall.
Speaker 2: So the event was a good will gesture. But later
Speaker 2: in the night there was an open bar and Thomas
Speaker 2: got very drunk, next per the Huffington Post. At one point,
Speaker 2: according to testimony and interviews with three others who were there,
Speaker 2: Kincaid pulled the men in the room about their preferences
Speaker 2: in women's anatomies. He was having a conversation with the
Speaker 2: men in the room about whether they liked breast or butts,
Speaker 2: said Lori Kopek, Coat's director of gallery operations, who also
Speaker 2: testified about the party. There were only two women in
Speaker 2: the room, and I was very uncomfortable at that point.
Speaker 2: It was during that bowdy discussion, according to arbitration records,
Speaker 2: that Kincaid turned his attention to the other woman. He
Speaker 2: approached her and palmed her breasts, and he said, these
Speaker 2: are great tits. Ernie Dodson, another Coat employee, told The Times,
Speaker 2: adding that he drank no alcohol that night. I was
Speaker 2: just standing there in the corner in amazement. It was
Speaker 2: like holy cow, and man, Dodson, I'm not really impressed
Speaker 2: that you didn't drink. You didn't like stop him, You
Speaker 2: didn't do anything. You didn't say like wow, boss, that's
Speaker 2: like fucked like you.
Speaker 3: There's a fucking limit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is really a step in moment. Brother. I'm
Speaker 2: not impressed that you didn't drink. I'd be more impressed
Speaker 2: if you were drunk too, and you had the moral
Speaker 2: presence to just hit the guy, right, don't do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a bare minimum. Hey stop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's gross. Man. This is a fucking company gathering
Speaker 2: and you are grabbing someone's tits. What the fuck? Anyway,
Speaker 2: when this came out, Kinkaid denied the allegation. He said
Speaker 2: this in a deposition. You've got to remember, I'm the
Speaker 2: idol to these women who were there. They sell my
Speaker 2: work every day. You know, they're enamored with any attention
Speaker 2: I would give them. I don't know what kind of
Speaker 2: flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't
Speaker 2: recall what was going on that night. Hey, buddy, quick
Speaker 2: tip here. I was too blacked out to know what
Speaker 2: kind of quote unquote flirting led to me groping someone.
Speaker 2: Not a defense anyway.
Speaker 1: You're disgusting. You're disgusting.
Speaker 2: You know what's not discuss though, Sophie. You know what
Speaker 2: makes me feel good? What makes everyone feel good? Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: we maybe don't say groping, but we do in it
Speaker 2: emotionally in the same way that John Wayne get. We're back,
Speaker 2: and I've just had a word with our own HR department.
Speaker 2: I apologize. I have deleted roughly a third of my
Speaker 2: short story it Yeah, yeah, I mean again, Sophie. It
Speaker 2: is mostly about the Federal Reserve ute. It later, Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: thank you, thank you. Smut it up some sona b
Speaker 2: oh oh God, it's got to be like a big
Speaker 2: Garfield style cat. I feel like see.
Speaker 3: I was thinking of one of those monkeys that's kind
Speaker 3: of colorful based with clown makeup.
Speaker 2: Mm. Yeah, that's a good one because that'd be really
Speaker 2: scary to get murdered by too. This is good, this
Speaker 2: is useful stuff. So the company, messaging to prospective gallery owners,
Speaker 2: painted a very different picture of Thomas. Lighthouse used terms
Speaker 2: like partner, trust, Christian, and God, arguing that not only
Speaker 2: was a Kincaid gallery a good investment and help you
Speaker 2: serve a higher calling, i e. God wants you to
Speaker 2: get rich selling Thomas's paintings now, Yes, yes, very much so.
Speaker 2: And Thomas would always deny to the press that he
Speaker 2: marketed specifically to Christians, but as limited edition prints each
Speaker 2: had Christian fish symbols printed on them along with Bible verses,
Speaker 2: his favorite being Matthew five sixteen let your Light Shine
Speaker 2: before Men. One of the people who fell for this
Speaker 2: was Jim Coate. Coate opened his first signature gallery in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six and claims that at the start, sales
Speaker 2: were great because Tom at that point was very popular
Speaker 2: and there were limited outlets to buy his art, but
Speaker 2: as the years went on, the situation deteriorate.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: As the La Times reports, Coate alleges Media Arts Group,
Speaker 2: which is what the company becomes known as, pushed him
Speaker 2: to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own
Speaker 2: outlets in his territory. Coate eventually had three stores, all
Speaker 2: of which failed. This is not bread and milk, he said.
Speaker 2: You can't have galleries on every corner. Cot said his
Speaker 2: net worth was of more than three million dollars had
Speaker 2: been erased gone or his marriage, his house, in most
Speaker 2: of his possessions. He doesn't blame his divorce entirely on
Speaker 2: his galley's failure, but it certainly didn't help. He shut
Speaker 2: his last door in December and has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Speaker 2: At this point, I've got a dog in an apartment
Speaker 2: and that's it. This is not where I thought i'd
Speaker 2: be at fifty six.
Speaker 1: Doesn't deserve a dog.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, I'm sure he sucks too, but it is.
Speaker 2: It is interesting the way this con goes right where
Speaker 2: he's like, okay, you've bought one with If you don't,
Speaker 2: you got to set up another like a block away.
Speaker 2: Otherwise we're going to set up one and run you
Speaker 2: out of business by undercuttry isn't.
Speaker 3: That use Subway does their franchises.
Speaker 2: Though, Yeah, they just had a meeting about how they're
Speaker 2: circling the drain too. But yes, I think you are correct.
Speaker 3: And you have to like, there's no way that they
Speaker 3: didn't understand that this was going to destroy because they know.
Speaker 2: They're just trying to suck money out of these people. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is like a no long term investment. This
Speaker 3: is just get this guy's money. Our peat was sold
Speaker 3: yea whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, it's even worse than that, because he's not just
Speaker 2: screwing these people to suck money out of them, he's
Speaker 2: screwing these people to crash the stock value of the
Speaker 2: company because Kincaid makes a bunch of calls in the
Speaker 2: early two thousands that a lot of people will argue
Speaker 2: and has been argued successfully in court, were deliberately made
Speaker 2: to tank the stock from a high of almost twenty
Speaker 2: five dollars to a less than three dollars a share,
Speaker 2: and then once the value of the stock had collapsed,
Speaker 2: he bought his company back and took it private. This
Speaker 2: is what causes that court case, which concludes in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six, and found that Kincaid's company had deliberately
Speaker 2: misrepresented itself to perspective gallery owners for the La Times.
Speaker 2: The arbitration panel found that the company and Barnett, who
Speaker 2: ran a training program for prospective gallery owners known as
Speaker 2: Thomas Kincaid University, painted an unreal, realistic, and misleading picture
Speaker 2: of the prospects for success and never warned potential investors
Speaker 2: of the inherent risks. We were told success story after
Speaker 2: success story, and of course the Tom story and his
Speaker 2: Christian views and the way he ran his life, one
Speaker 2: of the gallery owners told the arbitration panel. Now, this
Speaker 2: panel ultimately rules in favor of two gallery owners from
Speaker 2: Virginia who had sued him, awarding them almost nine hundred
Speaker 2: thousand dollars in damages. These people, all of whom had
Speaker 2: had money to burn when they started talking with Kincaid's people,
Speaker 2: are the least sympathetic of his victims because a lot
Speaker 2: of regular, not rich people got scammed into buying crappy
Speaker 2: princess An investment too. In the early two thousands, Kincaid's
Speaker 2: company started publishing books. A write up I found in
Speaker 2: Salon describes them all as being made by a semi
Speaker 2: industrial process, just like his highlighted paintings. In short, he
Speaker 2: would write an introduction and presumably approven outline, and then
Speaker 2: someone else would write the novel. Now you can compare
Speaker 2: this to his old friend whose Dinotopia books were labors
Speaker 2: of love. Whatever else you might say about them, it's
Speaker 2: it's clearly the Yeah, it's clearly the work of someone
Speaker 2: who cares deeply about telling a dinosaur story. Time with it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I remember them very fondly. I haven't picked them back
Speaker 2: up since I was like twelve, but I remember them fondly.
Speaker 3: Child that had puppets.
Speaker 2: See now that I didn't play ship, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 2: So all these books, as best as I can tell
Speaker 2: her about quaint small towns. Generally, there will be a
Speaker 2: woman who comes from the big city with a big
Speaker 2: job that's stressing her out, and she comes to a
Speaker 2: small town and she gets swept off her feet by
Speaker 2: some like farmer who convinces her the real joy in
Speaker 2: life is having a bunch of kids and no longer voting.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: They're all harrormarked movies. A lot of them focus on
Speaker 2: how sinful Boston is compared to the countryside, which I
Speaker 2: do approve of.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't disagree now, but I find everyone
Speaker 3: and everything there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it is the city of smells, like,
Speaker 2: that's what we all about Boston. Yeah, the city of piss. Look,
Speaker 2: Los Angeles a lot of good piss. New York great
Speaker 2: piss town, you know. But but Boston, of all the
Speaker 2: towns that smell like urine, definitely, well maybe Philadelphia anyway,
Speaker 2: There's actually a lot of towns that smell like piss,
Speaker 2: but Boston's top of the pack. I'll give it that.
Speaker 3: The day I moved to Boston, I was walking through
Speaker 3: Cambri like Harvard Square, and I turned a corner and
Speaker 3: a woman was holding her like five year old kid
Speaker 3: over like a potted plant on the street. It like
Speaker 3: it was from Texas, where it's like Boston over there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, public, it's the Boston city motto, Boston just go
Speaker 2: ship over there.
Speaker 3: All the comments you're gonna get from your Bostonian fans.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's okay, it's okay. You know, I live in Portland,
Speaker 2: the city of also shipping all over the place.
Speaker 3: It's a.
Speaker 2: Look you want to talk about shit, go back to
Speaker 2: the idealized like nineteen twenties. These people imagined back when
Speaker 2: there were horses all over everything. O. God, that's a
Speaker 2: lot of shit. You know, we barely shit in our
Speaker 2: cities compared to how much shit do.
Speaker 3: You still Georgia in springtime? It just seems are everywhere.
Speaker 2: So what I find most interesting about this Salon article
Speaker 2: about Thomas's shitty Kincaid novels is how the writer describes
Speaker 2: the reaction of Kincaid's fans to a negative review of
Speaker 2: the first book in the series, WHOA. Well, No, Actually
Speaker 2: this is a little different because this comes out after
Speaker 2: he's kind of been started to be disgraced. I began
Speaker 2: to receive emails from people who had sunk their life
Speaker 2: savings and Thomas Kincaid's signature galleries essentially mall and shopping
Speaker 2: district outlets for his prints, and been fleeced. I didn't
Speaker 2: really understand how the financial architecture of Kincaid's gallery empire worked,
Speaker 2: and I shouldn't share their taste in wal art. But
Speaker 2: these people struck me as decent and sincere They believed
Speaker 2: Thomas Kincaid not just in the man or the company,
Speaker 2: but in the ethos supposedly represented by his art, one
Speaker 2: in which, to quote Kincaid's introduction to Cape Light, people
Speaker 2: have the time to save her life simple pleasures and
Speaker 2: lead deep, satisfying lives. It's not hard to find accounts
Speaker 2: like these of people who purchased Kincaid Prince's investments and
Speaker 2: feel ripped off. I found one letter in a medium
Speaker 2: post by Charles Bodelaire, who apparently takes art questions from fans.
Speaker 2: Dear Charles, I have four original oil paintings by Thomas Kinkaid.
Speaker 2: I bought them about twenty five years ago and paid
Speaker 2: six thousand dollars for each of them. I love them
Speaker 2: and it gives me great pleasure to look at them.
Speaker 2: But because I am moving to an assisted living facility
Speaker 2: and will have no room for these paintings, I need
Speaker 2: to sell them. I thought i'd at least get my
Speaker 2: money back, and was shocked when the best offers I
Speaker 2: received were between three and four hundred dollars each. I
Speaker 2: cried for days. How could these beautiful works of art
Speaker 2: sell for such a pittance. It's because they just printed
Speaker 2: them out.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I don't want to make an old man feel
Speaker 2: bad about painting that bring him happiness in his twilight years.
Speaker 2: But like that is what happened. You got ripped off.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Like, I mean one thing.
Speaker 3: They said, Hey, by these paintings, aren't they pretty? You'll
Speaker 3: just enjoy looking every day? Cool? Great? Yeah, but he
Speaker 3: was told it was investment, was going to appreciate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. If someone wants to pay thousands of dollars
Speaker 2: for a painting that looks pretty like I do, that's
Speaker 2: not a scam unless you're making them think that this
Speaker 2: is something that will make their money appreciate, you know that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a bummer.
Speaker 3: He really is the Trump of the art world, isn't.
Speaker 2: He's the Trump of the artworld? That's exactly. Yeah. When
Speaker 2: I may steal that from you for the title, and
Speaker 2: then you can take me to court. You know, we're
Speaker 2: gonna we're going to spend the rest of the twenty
Speaker 2: twenties litigating and seeing I'm hearing about.
Speaker 3: It's people who believed him there was a.
Speaker 2: Fucking university, Yes, yes, for teaching his gallery owners how
Speaker 2: to get fleeced. As the early two thousands faded into
Speaker 2: the aughts, Kincaid was still a big business, although the
Speaker 2: number of galleries devoted to his work and plunged from
Speaker 2: a high of three hundred and fifty to something like
Speaker 2: half that. So he's still a big business. Yes, that's
Speaker 2: not a that's that's bigger. I mean there's no other
Speaker 2: single artist you can say that about really anyway, there's
Speaker 2: any artists on earth like that. Yeah, Now that just
Speaker 2: maybe Disney being actually caring about having a sustainable business
Speaker 2: right now. Somewhere around two thousand and eight or two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine, his marriage fell apart and he and
Speaker 2: Nannette separated. Kincaid does seem to have loved her despite
Speaker 2: his achieveding, and included constant references to her and their
Speaker 2: marriage in his work. He would like put their the
Speaker 2: date of their anniversary and paintings after they had split up,
Speaker 2: and he seems to have spiraled increasingly once she left.
Speaker 2: His drug use in drinking grew more severe. The Daily
Speaker 2: Beast describes one December twenty ten event that shows his
Speaker 2: mood well quote. Fans in Denver had been promised a
Speaker 2: thirty minute inspirational presentation. What they got was an ungroomed,
Speaker 2: under addressed speaker who was none too pleased with the
Speaker 2: media's coverage. Of his recent arrest for drunk driving, stays
Speaker 2: in public and I make a headline. He sneered. Then
Speaker 2: he complained about the media's lack of attention to his
Speaker 2: charitable works. America's most known, most beloved artist shows up
Speaker 2: in an Orange County hospital. We threw in all day,
Speaker 2: kids of it. We hosted art contest. We gave art
Speaker 2: packages to all the kids. I talked to them about
Speaker 2: journaling their life, about creating something every day that makes
Speaker 2: a statement. And we sent word out to every newspaper.
Speaker 2: Come down, see this day of joy, this day of celebration.
Speaker 2: No one showed, but make one wrong step in public
Speaker 2: and they put it on the front page. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: Thomas Kincaid gives kitchy fucking journals to sick kids. Is
Speaker 2: not an art story in the way that rich artists
Speaker 2: caught drunk driving is. Maybe that's wrong, but it's just obvious.
Speaker 3: You remember that since this episode Camp Krusty, where like
Speaker 3: Crusty shows up like.
Speaker 2: So when he finishes, Kincaid asks the organizers to make
Speaker 2: sure that his room is alcohol free, and then he
Speaker 2: keeps the owner of the Colorado Concaide Gallery up until
Speaker 2: like the early hours of the morning talking about his
Speaker 2: ex wife. Just a perfect picture of a man's spiraling
Speaker 2: and Thomas, this is definitely the terminal part of the spiral.
Speaker 2: A month after that event, he spends ten days in
Speaker 2: jail on his DUI charge. He tries to get sober
Speaker 2: after that, but he just keeps relapsing, falling back into
Speaker 2: drugs and alcohol. A little over a year later, he
Speaker 2: has found unconscious. He spends several days in a coma,
Speaker 2: and when he wakes up, the doctor say basically, hey man,
Speaker 2: you have to sober up now or die. You don't
Speaker 2: get more chances, right. This isn't the kind of thing
Speaker 2: where like you can dry out for a while and
Speaker 2: then get back to the drinking and drugs. This is it.
Speaker 2: If you fuck around anymore, you're dead. And, as is
Speaker 2: often the case, he does not take this warning. Two
Speaker 2: months later, on April sixth, twenty twelve, he overdoses and died.
Speaker 2: Thomas Kincaid was fifty four. Reporting after his death revealed
Speaker 2: that he was actively under federal investigation for securities fraud.
Speaker 2: So there is some suspicion that maybe this was suicide.
Speaker 2: You know, it's possible, right. He apparently was again a
Speaker 2: lot of crimes associated with this, the Painter of Light,
Speaker 2: Trump of art World, the Trump of the art world.
Speaker 2: The immediate wake of his death saw a huge surgeon sales.
Speaker 2: Fans gathered at fifty some galleries around the country in
Speaker 2: a public wake, and then the autopsy report came out,
Speaker 2: which showed that he had died of acute alcohol and
Speaker 2: valium intoxication. I think most of his followers, some of
Speaker 2: them are surprised, but it doesn't really reduce the amount
Speaker 2: of love for his work. I actually find some of
Speaker 2: the writing on this gross where they're like, haha, this man,
Speaker 2: like like, look now everyone's going to stop liking him
Speaker 2: because he owed Dean, And it's like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 2: A lot of artists people love that kill themselves with
Speaker 2: That's kind of the norm for artists that people love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that also pains additions of personal failing and addiction
Speaker 3: is a disease, Like I'm not coold with that, Like
Speaker 3: you can hate someone but also be sad that they
Speaker 3: fell down addition.
Speaker 2: And I would say the fact that he, after splitting
Speaker 2: up with his wife, fell to addiction is not contradictory
Speaker 2: to the Christian values and the same way that the
Speaker 2: fact that he is sexually assaulting people and committing securities fraud.
Speaker 3: Is that right? Is all way more setting to him? Yeah,
Speaker 3: the death is a little sad. Oh yeah, no, everything
Speaker 3: else is disgusting.
Speaker 2: Yeah right. Uh so what did more damage to his
Speaker 2: memory was the fact that there's this horrible legal fight
Speaker 2: afterwards between his ex wife and his new girlfriend, who
Speaker 2: claimed to have letters that he wrote her while drunk
Speaker 2: promising her a bunch of his assets. The matter is
Speaker 2: offitually said, eventually settled out of court, but it made
Speaker 2: it kind of impossible to hide the unsavory elements of
Speaker 2: Kincaid's legacy. Now, if you have paid a tension at
Speaker 2: all to how evangelical Christians responded to Trump's many foibles
Speaker 2: and amoral acts, you're not surprised that a lot of
Speaker 2: people continued to love Kincaid after all this came out.
Speaker 2: His company is still around. It's opened up to new
Speaker 2: artists and even branded content, so obviously they've seen need
Speaker 2: to expand since his death, But by all accounts, he
Speaker 2: is still an exceedingly profitable artist. Thomas, though, now has
Speaker 2: to rest in the eternal hell that awaits all artists,
Speaker 2: because if your work is notable enough to be discussed
Speaker 2: in any fashion, any fashion, some critic is always going
Speaker 2: to get the last word, right, if your work is
Speaker 2: worth talking about, it's always going to be a critic
Speaker 2: who gets the last word, because you're going to die someday.
Speaker 2: And in Thomas's case, some of those critics were scholars
Speaker 2: from the British Journal of Aesthetics who conducted a study
Speaker 2: to see if they could quantify how bad his art was.
Speaker 2: This study, mere exposure to bad art, tested whether or
Speaker 2: not repeated exposure to Kincaid's work would cause someone to
Speaker 2: like it more or less, and they paired Kincaid the
Speaker 2: control group was a better artist, right, somebody who had
Speaker 2: had like a general level of critical you know, acclaim
Speaker 2: And after repeated viewings, participants reported no change in their
Speaker 2: appreciation of the good art quote, but repeated viewings of
Speaker 2: the Painter of Light prompted strong negative emotions, with participants
Speaker 2: saying they liked his stuff less each time it popped
Speaker 2: up in front of their eyes. Now Here are those
Speaker 2: result reactions in graph form taken from an earlier unpublished
Speaker 2: form of the research. And yeah, it's a you know,
Speaker 2: there's a theory that this may be because exposure to
Speaker 2: Kincaid over time makes the flaws and his work glaringly obvious,
Speaker 2: and so people come to hate it the more they
Speaker 2: look at it. This is clearly not true to as
Speaker 2: many fans, but it does lead lend some comfort to
Speaker 2: the rest of us. Right if you are like I
Speaker 2: find this this guy like more upsetting every piece of
Speaker 2: art that you've shown of his their scientific backing for that,
Speaker 2: you are in the norm, So good news there, and.
Speaker 3: At bit ship it is.
Speaker 4: Really it's incredibly petty for a dead man who like
Speaker 4: died in a very sad fashion alone of an overdose,
Speaker 4: to be like, let's see if we can scientifically prove
Speaker 4: he sucked.
Speaker 3: It's some of my disdain for for critics in general,
Speaker 3: because there is such a I need to prove why.
Speaker 3: It's not opinion, it's fat proving. No, Oh my.
Speaker 2: God, it's the pettiest thing I've ever heard of, And
Speaker 2: I respect. There's a degree to which you have to
Speaker 2: respect that level of petty.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that's impressive. Spent some time on that.
Speaker 2: You really put in the effort to hate this guy's paintings,
Speaker 2: And I guess I just wrote eighty five hundred words
Speaker 2: about why I don't like his art. So I'm not
Speaker 2: that petty, but I'm certainly in the upper level of why.
Speaker 3: You don't like him. I think that's a different.
Speaker 2: I do not that is that is fair. I believe
Speaker 2: I felt this for a long time. The only the
Speaker 2: real valid artistic expression in our society is reprinted T
Speaker 2: shirts of Bart Simpson during the Gulf War. You know,
Speaker 2: that's that's all. Great art is just some kind of
Speaker 2: reprinted Bart Simpson T shirt made in order that the
Speaker 2: generated so they did. Yes, of course, of course, yes,
Speaker 2: any any early nineties illegal Bart Simpson merchandise is art
Speaker 2: and nothing else is anyway, plug your art.
Speaker 3: Wow. So uh you can see my my mean spirited
Speaker 3: comic at somebody positive dot net or at mousetrapped dot blog.
Speaker 3: Is another thing I do. I also draw the Sunday
Speaker 3: Popeyes at comics Kingdom dot com slash Popeye, and if
Speaker 3: you go to Comics Kingdom at com slash, I believe
Speaker 3: it's hold on. I not prepared, That's why would I be.
Speaker 3: I'm still winded by I did not expect this to
Speaker 3: have sexual assault. Yeah dot com slash all of hyphen
Speaker 3: Popeye Tuesdays and Thursdays is new strips. There, I knew
Speaker 3: the Thursday strips. Yeah wow, I that did not go
Speaker 3: where I thought it was gonna go.
Speaker 2: No, no, well, you know, I'm always happy to hear that, Randy.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And all I can say is, I.
Speaker 3: Don't feel like I have gone off compared to most
Speaker 3: of your guests.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, fairly low that. This is one of our
Speaker 2: more low stakes bastards. For sure.
Speaker 3: There's no dead children in this episode that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no dead kids. You know, some old people lose
Speaker 2: their savings. Definitely a sexual assault or too. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: not not our worst, not our worst. But you know,
Speaker 2: next time we have Randy on and I finally reveal
Speaker 2: the dark truth behind the person who does high and Lois, I'm.
Speaker 3: Just gonna say, uh huh.
Speaker 2: Look, there's literally.
Speaker 3: A national Cartoon to Society meeting next week. I'm supposed
Speaker 3: to go.
Speaker 2: The word war crimes gets thrown a lot around a
Speaker 2: lot these days, but it should be around here. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's gonna make a real awkward meeting next week.
Speaker 2: When I will wait until I publish my investigation and
Speaker 2: we get the high end Lois person up in front
Speaker 2: of the Hague. Uh, which one is there is there
Speaker 2: a couple I don't know much about. Hyan Lowis I'm
Speaker 2: gonna be.
Speaker 3: Hi and Lois is technically a spin off of Beatle Bailey.
Speaker 3: I believe more Walker and I believe it's the it's
Speaker 3: his kids, and I believe that the kids behind the
Speaker 3: creator of Hanger the Horrible.
Speaker 2: Well, uh, you know, Hagi the Horrible. We'll see how
Speaker 2: horrible he was next time. Randy, thank you.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Yes, thanks for being around. All right, everybody. That's the
Speaker 2: episode go to Hell. I Love you.
Speaker 1: Pleae. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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