Pablo Picasso Month - Day 16

A little less scary than the quote from a few days ago, but I don't know which is worse - being artistically sterile, or being artistically pathetic.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

~ Pablo Picasso

Both are hard to think about, and maybe equally bad if you exist primarily to make art. And some of us do exist primarily to make art. I'm not sure that I do, but when I'm in the studio it feels – briefly, fleetingly – like my purpose it to communicate with ideas made manifest in art.

---

Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Pablo Picasso Month - Day 13

Scary. Very scary.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

~ Pablo Picasso

I can see it though. It's the story of the writer who has a best seller and then all their subsequent books are the same book with different details. It's the sequels and prequels to blockbuster movies...

---

Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Thomas Kinkade is rather stupid

I just read (via the Chronicle's Arts & Letters Daily) a Vanity Fair article about some really banal movie that Thomas Kinkade has made/painted...

What babble- the movie, not the article. The article was sort of interesting – especially Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for making the movie have the "Kincade Look". Gag. Gag. Gag.

If the article is factual, it seems that Mr. Kinkade is another religious person solely focused on the external, on appearances. I find that disingenuous in an artist - but right on course for people who parade their religious views as models of charity and love, but use them for profit. As an artist I find Kinkade pitiful. The aesthetic of his work is puerile romantic meaningless drivel. The aggravating thing is that people buy this crap.

We live in a Kinkade world where the mundane is worshiped as being "for the people," where anti-intellectualism runs rampant, where people see technical ability as artistic ability. Thomas Kinkade's work is the embodiment of all that is mundane. The places in Thomas Kinkade paintings have never existed outside of someone's mind and I suppose that is why he is popular. People love to pretend that things are different than they really are. We tell ourselves lies whenever possible, and believe them as gospel truth.

Oh, and I also hate the tendency for cover artists who do movie covers/posters to have photos of people with other people's names above them. What's the matter with them?