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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

Contemporary art is seldom given sustained anthropological analysis despite its tantalizing potential. As a response, this essay examines the work of Thomas Kinkade to cast an oblique light on the production of value. Kinkade’s mechanically reproduced opus representing Cotswold cottages, quaint city scenes, and Disney fantasies are sold by authorized dealers in malls, along tourist strips, and online. Rather than operating as kitsch, lowbrow, or a new model for art-making, Kinkade’s overt profit motive, self-celebration, and evangelical Christianity refract political, economic, and especially aesthetic constructions that undergird contemporary markets. A bad boy of the aesthetic economy, Kinkade’s work, mostly dismissed by the established art world, nevertheless has much to say about it, and about us. Ultimately, I suggest that The Painter of Light’s™ success shows that aesthetic sensibility is integral to political economy, rather than epiphenomenal to it, and that we must therefore pay attention to the role of art therein.

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