Thomas Kinkade, the "Evil-est Painter," amassed $50–70 million selling mass-produced prints to middle-class Americans via pyramid-like schemes with Ken Rash. Despite claiming a 1980s Christian awakening, he pivoted from failed fine art and Ralph Bakshi backgrounds to marketing "master highlighters" who faked originality, deceiving courts while saturating one in ten homes. His garish, safe nostalgia contrasts sharply with Norman Rockwell's political depth, now fueling AI datasets and horror edits, proving his business model exploited a desire for emotional comfort over critical engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:14:14
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that lies about its guests and gets them made the suspects of ongoing murder investigations.
Welcome to the program, Randy Mill Holland.
Randy, have you ever been suspected of a series of violent crimes?
Only a triple rigisign.
Oh, that's a good crime to be suspected for.
Well, Randy, today we're going to come up with a crime and insinuate to our listeners that you committed it.
Although, you know, honestly, before we started this podcast, you were talking about having just moved to LA and people looking at you suspiciously because you are, like me, a hulking man with a beard.
I used to have a much longer beard too.
And I know those looks.
And honestly, when I started the rumors that Jamie Loftus had killed all those people in Grand Rapids, I was just trying to make her more empathetic to the struggles of men like you and me, you know, so that she knows what it's like.
Yeah.
We're the really the largest discriminated against group in this country.
I cannot let you continue this bit.
Why not?
Men who look like extras from one of the dwarf heavy Lord of the Rings movies?
Like, what's wrong with that?
Are you saying that?
Because you're wearing the Legolas t-shirt.
I did not know that you were wearing a Legolas t-shirt.
I am.
Randy, welcome back to the show.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.
You're the artist and writer behind the something positive webcomic.
You are also the legal guardian of Popeye, the sailor man.
Yes, that is factually accurate.
And you came on the show for the first time, I think it was last year, to talk about Scott Adams because I've been a fan of your work for a while.
And I found out that you were a fan of the pod.
And I was like, oh, this will be, I like to do that.
You know, this will be great.
We'll have Randy on for the one episode about an artist that we ever do.
Surely there aren't that many world-class historical monsters who are also working illustrators, right?
How many could there be?
Anyway, this is your third time back on the show.
You know.
Welcome back, Randy.
It is amazing.
Yeah.
In fairness, there's a lot of artists who are pieces of shit.
Yeah.
I mean, I get when you think about all of the other kinds of art that produces monsters, I guess it's not surprising.
Just don't trust people who are creative.
You know, if anybody has a creative thought around you, just start hitting them.
Robert.
What?
By job.
By job titles, head of creative, I feel attacked.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you're about to be attacked if our listeners do the job.
Anyway, Randy.
What do you know?
What have you heard about Thomas Kincaid?
I know he's dead.
Yes.
And yes, despite being dead.
That's going to be a real highlight of these episodes.
I know that despite being dead, his signature still appears a brand new art, which leads me to think there's some type of assembly line going on.
That's really it.
Like, I think my grandmother had one of his prints, and that's about it.
Like, I know a lot of artists or people who are into art love to dunk on him.
Yes, he does.
He gets his art gets attacked.
And honestly, some of the dunks strike me as people being like a little bit up their own assholes.
But I don't like his art particularly either.
But no, he's not a bad.
We're not just going to be doing an episode where we make fun of this guy's art because it's bad art.
He both occupies a place in culture where he contributed to the kind of right-wing derangement of our society.
And more to the point, he was like a deeply unethical man who took advantage of his customers.
And he also is kind of the kind of the Ford of paintings.
Like what you said about there being an industrial factory aspect to what he did is very much accurate.
Although maybe not entirely in the way that you had predicted.
But Randy, you want to learn about Thomas motherfucking Kincaid?
Ew, I was excited to, and then I saw that this meeting is scheduled for three hours and I'm a little more nervous about it now.
Yeah, we'll see how long it goes.
My brain went straight to my brain goes to like Ford and all the anti-Semitisms.
I'm like, I can't wait to see what pamphlets Kincaid put out.
Not that bad.
Well, Randy, I will say the working title for this episode is The Panther of Light was Worse Than Hitler.
So that was for your eyes only, Sophie.
That's not an accurate title.
Sometimes you just, you know, hyperbole is a necessary coping mechanism when you have to write 8,500 words about Thomas Kincaid, the painter of light.
Anyway, here it fucking goes.
8,500, something like that.
Pretty normal script.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's a lot to write about Thomas Kincaid, though.
Anyway, I bet.
Cold open, closed.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, Pablo Sis.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild back to the way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
So I think probably more than half of the people listening have some awareness of who this is just after I mentioned his name.
He is one of the best known, if not the best known artists in the United States.
And like you said, Randy, you think you have a relative who might have had one of his prints.
A lot of people do, right?
If you've ever been walking through like a relative's house or a particularly opulent Airbnb and seen a garish painting or a series of garish paintings featuring idealized rural or small town life with kind of a distinctive 50s Americana feel and a use of color and light that feels simultaneously quaint yet sinister, you are familiar with the work of Thomas Kincaid.
And if you aren't, Sophie's going to put up on the screen some examples.
For the listeners, I'm going to try and describe this.
This is going to be one of the more visual episodes we've had just because we're talking about a painter.
That's part of why we're doing adding video now.
Although I promise most of our episodes won't be about painters.
Yes.
Check out the YouTube.
Yeah.
Youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.
If not, let me describe them.
The first one we've got here is the perspective in this painting is really fucked, but it looks like almost it might be.
That's just me because I'm like, yeah, yeah, that tractor tiny.
That truck also, even with the distance, looks tiny.
Like that, you've got a soldier walking towards like a cottage farm house.
There's some bus that's clearly dropped him off on a dirt road.
He's walking home.
Looks like about World War II.
Maybe it could be Vietnam era, probably more closer to Vietnam.
Oh, they tied it yellow around the room around the tree.
So, you know, they're waiting for him.
Yeah, so they've been waiting for him.
Yeah, it's a soldier returning home.
The cabin, part of where I say sinister is like, it's a daytime picture.
Like it's clearly the middle of the day.
Like you can see blue sky and a lot of bright clouds.
There's a lot of light on the ground.
But also the cabin is glowing from the inside in a way that I think is supposed to seem warm and homely, but makes it feel like a cabin from a fucking Sam Raimi movie.
Like it feels like there's a devil inside there.
And this soldier's come back home, having just survived the war to confront the evil that's devoured his family.
He does have the necronomic on in that backpack.
That's why it's so bulgy.
Yes.
Yeah, that he just, this is an alternate history where we won Vietnam by bringing the Deadites down upon them.
Honestly, pretty good movie in that premise.
Or bad movie in that premise.
There's a role-playing game in that, I think, actually.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
So the second picture we've got here is kind of a very classic Kincaid.
This is a cabin in the woods.
Again, you've got like the whole cabin lit from the inside in a way that is supposed to be homey, but also seems kind of vaguely sinister.
Everything sparkles a lot.
There's almost a glossy feel.
Like it feels like if you've ever put, if you've ever been like painting miniatures and like done like a glaze or something over them, it feels like the whole picture's been kind of glazed in that way.
Yeah.
And then the third one we've got.
It looks like a Christmas village building.
Yes, it does look like it.
That's the best way to describe it, Randy.
Is if you've ever, if you ever had a relative who like every year on the holidays would put up one of those Christmas model villages, all of his paintings of cabins look like that.
And it's a lot of small town paintings too.
Very much like kind of the best touchstone for that if you haven't seen a Kincaid somehow.
And then this last one, surprise, surprise, he's super Christian and not the good kind.
And we've got this painting of a cross on top of a mountain and like the clouds are kind of like retreating from the path of the that of the cross like that that gives it a line straight to the sun, which is setting.
It's this, I don't know, very again, it almost looks AI generated, right?
I think a lot of people's first reaction to seeing these in the year 2024, if they weren't familiar with Kincaid, would go, oh, are these like some AI art, right?
It almost that like hyper-real, like shiny look that all of the AI shit has.
His work kind of has.
Yeah, that's that's very unpleasant.
I don't know why that bothers me so much.
Yeah, I find it off-putting too.
And I think there's a good reason why my head immediately goes to, and I look at it now, oh, this kind of looks like a lot of AI art, because every AI image generator has scraped a shitload of Kincaid's work.
He was incredibly prolific and incredibly popular.
And I do think he actually has probably wound up having an influence on because of how well his stuff, like, it doesn't just sell.
People will post Kincaid paintings to like Facebook to get engagement.
And I think that that has, to a significant extent, influenced how a lot of these image generators work and a lot of the crap that they put out.
And we'll be talking about that more later.
But for those of you who haven't been able to see the art, or those of you who just want to hear someone smarter than me describe it, I want to quote Joan Didian's description of Thomas Kincaid's style.
A Kincaid painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels.
It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel.
Every window was lit to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.
The cottages had thatched roofs and resembled a gingerbread house.
The houses were Victorian and resembled idealized bed and breakfasts, at least two of which in Placerville, the Chinchester McKee House and the Cummelback Blair House, claim to have been the models for Kincaid Christmas paintings.
So it's very much a lot of it's kind of this idolized rural California chic.
And it's, yeah, I think Joan kind of gets it right there.
It does, there's something vaguely evil about his paintings.
Suddenly, I want a Kincaid painting of the gas station from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
That's actually, there's kind of a whole style of like meme art that is people taking Kincaid paintings and like turning them into pieces of horror.
We'll talk about that in a little bit, but it's remarkably easy to do.
Now, Kincaid is the kind of guy who is mostly remembered as making like wall art for hotel grade kind of shit, but he's probably the best-selling American painter of the last generation.
And he is by any account one of the wealthiest artists of any medium ever to live.
He died worth somewhere between 50 and 70 million dollars.
The Art Market's Hidden Value00:03:31
So you are talking about like basically no one in the arts ever makes that kind of money, right?
Like he is a yeah.
The only person I can think of who probably came close or may have surpassed was like Charles Schultz in his lifetime.
Schultz or Davis, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, yeah, I think you're probably right that like you have to go to some of the most to the most successful commercial cartoonists of, and again, you're still going back like a generation to talk about anyone getting that kind of money for this sort of work.
And, you know, what part of what makes him different is that those guys, like Schultz, is making art that is consumed by tens of millions of people, right?
That's why there's so much money and it was so much money in it for him.
Painting is a bit different, right?
Most paintings, you know, most painters, if they get rich, do it because they make something that gets, you know, develops a value because of its kind of cultural weight and it gets sold to someone very wealthy who's willing to pay for it.
And then it kind of gets deranged from any sort of real value that can go back to the artist because what happens with great paintings and valuable works of art when they get bought by rich people usually is those rich people put them in storage containers and trade them back and forth with each other as a way of kind of laundering money.
That is most of the art market, like the big art market.
Kincaid made all of this money.
He didn't make this money selling originals to very rich people.
He made all of his money selling prints to middle-class people, right?
And that's completely unique.
No one else really has done it to the extent that he was able to do it.
And, you know, it's counting stuff like this is always kind of a crapshoot.
But one credible estimate says that sort of at the height of his popularity, something like one in 10 American homes had a Thomas Kincaid print on at least one wall, which is nuts.
Like that's a crazy level of penetration.
I guarantee it's more now because I know his label has licensing agreements with Harry Potter, Disney, and the Disney brands.
Like there are fucking Marvel Star Wars shit.
Yeah.
The Star Wars ones I've seen, and they're that's some ugly composition.
I feel kind of bad saying, like, I don't like busting an art, but it's just it's it's he's turned into this is not really as much of what it was what for the most part when he was alive, but it's just kind of turned into, well, people know this name and they know that they can get art from here.
So let's make as many deals as we can.
But during his lifetime, it was really just selling his work.
And we're going to talk about like how he actually made that profitable because it was by taking the logic that we see used in multi-level marketing, like pyramid schemes, and by right-wing populist politicians and applying it to art sales, right?
That's how he got this successful.
And the fact that this worked says a lot about our country, which is kind of why we're telling this story in the year of our Lord 2024 as this, as we watch an election where one site is largely propped up by an alliance of used card dealers, crypto scammers, and fucking multi-level marketing con men.
So yeah.
You might be being generous on that one.
Yeah.
William Thomas Kincaid III was born January 19th, 1958 in Sacramento, California, better known as the very crack of hell itself.
Growing Up in a Broken Home00:07:51
Have you been to Sacramento much?
No, I've not been to Sacramento at all.
City of trees, they call it.
City of trees.
I have.
And yes.
Yes, Robert.
Yes.
It's okay.
I had to live in Redding, Sacramento.
I know, I know Suffering too.
So he grew up in Placerville.
He grew up in Placerville.
Sacramento's fine.
He grew up in Placerville, which was a quiet mountain town in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
His childhood is always a sore spot for him.
He does not recall it as a nice one, but he's also a professional fabulous.
So he's going to lie about it constantly.
But one thing that is more or less accurate is that he came from a broken home.
His father abandoned the family when Thomas was five.
He was a painter, although he never sold anything, and mostly was an alcoholic who survived off of part-time janitorial work.
Thomas is probably that's most painters.
That's artists.
That's most painters.
Yes.
Drunk and doing janitorial work to get by because painting is just not a great way to get money.
Nope.
Thomas's brother Patrick recalls him as a lovable sad sack who was more of a bit player in their childhoods than a father, right?
This is not a situation where like he's gone entirely.
I know it's a real bleak, like he's like a guest star in like a TV sitcom.
Like one episode, once a season, he'll come in for an episode.
Played by Charles Nelson Riley.
Yeah.
Weirdly, one of the quotes from Patrick about their dad sounds very similar to Dr. Evil's speech about his father and Austin Powers.
And I just have to, I'm not going to try to do the voice, but Tom and I both certainly felt that we were more sophisticated than he was.
He'd go off on these tangents, these flights of fancy about what he was going to do with his life, these bouts of expertise that he really had no expertise about.
He'd be so into it.
And Tom and I would just sit there and smile and nod, knowing that this was all nonsense and that my father didn't really have the capacity to carry out that plan.
He wanted to sail around the Sea of Cortez.
He had this weird little boat that in no way was ready, nor was he a sailor.
He had a hat and a map.
Wow.
I'm sorry.
I'm not laughing at your sad childhood, but that's pretty funny.
No, that's that's kind of like that's amazing.
Yeah, that feels like some arrested development level shit.
Since their dad was pretty useless, care and feeding of the family fell upon their single mother.
She got by as best she could, working as a notary public and surviving with the help of government welfare.
Unfortunately, like there's no shame in having to get by on welfare as a single moment.
Absolutely not because some people need it.
The problem is she hid this dependency from her kids, which as a result, they grew up not kind of, and I think this plays into how Tom is as an adult.
They grew up not really aware of how much of their survival had hinged on the existence of a social safety net.
For an example of kind of how she hid this, Tom and his brother as kids thought that the jars of peanut butter stamped property of El Dorado County were gifts from friends.
Like she didn't want to admit to them how bad their financial situation was.
And as a result, as kids, they weren't really aware of like how much they like their family was being supported by society, right?
Which is, I think, not bad, especially if you're a kid who grows up to be crazy rich, maybe the feeling that like, oh, when I was a kid and needed it, I was able to benefit from the support of my society.
Perhaps I have a moral obligation now that I'm rich to help out other people.
Thomas is not going to grow up feeling that way, right?
Yeah.
I mean, maybe he wouldn't have either way.
Right.
I mean, I feel sympathy and empathy for her because that's tough.
You don't, it's got to be a bruise to the ego.
And also, you don't want your kid to be made fun of because the kids that go to school are going to be brutal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I get why you would hide that.
I understand like the shame of it.
You know, I am thinking back to my own childhood and I'm kind of glad that my dad let me know about like when he was on unemployment, like what that is and how it works and like growing up with even that kind of understanding.
There should be no stigma to that stuff.
If you need help, you need help and you should be able to get it.
And that's, that's not how he's going to, Patrick is going to grow up thinking about this sort of stuff.
Or that's not how Thomas and Patrick are going to grow up thinking about this sort of stuff.
Their mother, they remember as a very cheery person who used good humor to hide their desperate financial straits.
At one point, all of the family furniture was repossessed.
When the boys came home to an empty house, their mother told them she'd chosen to get rid of the furniture so they could have a fun time camping out in their house.
So again, not shitting on this lady.
She's doing the best with what she's got.
That's true.
I mean, that's a very sweet thing.
I get the desire to shield your children from stuff like that because it fucks with them.
That's right.
That's a trauma.
You're trying to make sure your kid doesn't just sound like a great mom, to be honest.
Yeah, she sounds like she did her very best.
You know, you can't guarantee kids are going to come out not being assholes.
No.
Yeah.
And that said, I'm also not 100% sure how much of this to believe because that does sound like a Hallmark original movie.
And Thomas is like, he always has Hallmark brain.
He's constantly spinning his own life story.
And I wouldn't be entirely surprised if aspects of this whole broken home, you know, plucky but beleaguered single mom story were kind of played up because he knows how they play as like a narrative, right?
I don't know, though.
But his version of the story is that at a very young age, his mother told him that he had to be the man of his house now because his dad had left.
Now, that same version of the story, the one that Thomas liked to share, claims that in school, he was a child prodigy, good at math, civics, every class, but especially drawn to art.
His first major artistic venture was commercial.
At age 14, he set up a stand selling his drawings for $2 each.
In an article for The New Yorker, Sue Orlean writes: every time he sold one, he would marvel at how he could make money on something that had taken him only 15 minutes to do.
And that does, that his early attitude about art is, wow, I can, with very little work, make money off of this.
Like, kind of, he's already thinking, how can I maximize spending as little time as possible to get as much return on the time I put into art?
Like, he's financialized it a bit.
Yeah.
I do, if he is, I mean, it sounds like he was actually very poor.
I get that, right?
Because it's this thing that, like, people who grew up more comfortable, it's hard to understand, but like, you kind of have to think of everything in financial terms when you're that as a kid.
So I'm not surprised.
Yeah, that's fair.
And honestly, like, on one level, it's nice to know that someone with artistic skill early realized that they could make money.
Because I've so many artists don't understand the value of the work and get fucked over really hard for it.
So, on one hand, it's nice to know that a young age he understood his value.
I just also know where this is going.
Yeah.
More or less.
I don't know if I'm not happy about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Thomas was promising enough as an artist that he started attracting mentors as a teenager.
One of them was a prominent artist named Glenn Wessels, who was a professor at the California College of Arts and UC Berkeley.
Wessels eventually convinced Kincaid to pursue art as a career and go to UC Berkeley.
Supernatural Fandom Jokes Explained00:06:51
Now, the story of Glenn and Thomas is a load-bearing piece of the Thomas Kincaid story, so much so that in 2008, it became the subject of a Christmas biopic titled Thomas Kincaid's Christmas Cottage.
Peter O'Toole plays Glenn, and in a shocking twist, Thomas Kincaid is played by Jared Padalecki, aka of the less interesting brother from Supernatural.
Really?
Really?
I was shocked as hell to see that.
That's some.
It's like right at the start of the series, Jared Padalecki, too.
So I am so sorry, but I am absolutely looking up screenshots of that movie.
People say it's okay.
The audience score is 62%.
I just can't believe they had Rory Gilmore as a worst boyfriend.
Wow.
Wow.
He's clearly the worst Winchester brother, Sophie.
Jesus.
He's Rory Gamar's worst boyfriend.
I will tell you the differences between us.
Yeah, look at the hair on that movie.
Also, like, it's by any count, like, it's, what's the word I'm looking for?
It's a compliment to have Jared Padalecki in 2006 cast as you in the movie about your adolescence or your young adulthood.
But also, like, I'm sorry, Thomas Kincaid.
You don't look like Jared Padalecki.
What are we talking about here?
Thomas Kinkade looks like.
Oh, no.
Absolutely, Sophie.
Pull that up because the people need to see.
He's like a toe with a beard.
He does not look like 2006 Jared Padalecki.
No!
No!
He doesn't 2006 future Walker Texas Ranger disastrous idea for a reboot, Jared Padalecki.
Oh my God.
I'm seeing a Patriot.
Oh, there's a picture of Kincaid with a mullet.
God damn.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't believe it.
That man knows the street value of many.
He could never be Rory Gilmore's worst boyfriend.
He could be Rory Gilmore's worst boyfriend, but Rory Gilmore would have had to have several hard years first.
So true.
So true.
He looks like a pretending to be straight and trailer park version of Glenn Shadix, who was Otho and Beetlejuice.
What a very specific comparison.
You know, thank you, Randy.
That's who should have fucking played him.
Yeah.
Wanted Please Shadix because he was an amazing actor.
Yeah.
And so let's see what you can do.
Yeah.
Speaking of Jared Padalecki, this podcast is sponsored by DeviantArt.
Oh, I thought you were going to say your worst boyfriend.
God, no.
I was making a supernatural fandom joke.
Yeah.
See, I hear deviant art.
I just think of the worst, most upsetting furry fetish stuff that someone can inflict on you.
Oh, you can find some great furry fetish supernatural cross art.
Good stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Find five ship there.
Soup fur natural?
Supernatural?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Soup fur natural.
God damn it.
Yeah, there's probably a whole convention based around that.
Anyway, if you're a member of the supernatural furry pornography fandom, this has been your lucky day on behind the bastards.
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I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
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Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Magnetism of Distorted Work00:15:17
Anyway, so yeah, I don't know about this movie, but what one reviewer calls it overly sentimental and overly acted, yet surprisingly enjoyable, which corresponds to how a lot of people feel about Thomas's artwork, right?
You could say that about every Kincaid painting.
It's cloyingly sweet and it drips with enough nostalgia to clog your arteries, but there is something compelling about it.
This may be, it's like, that is kind of the thing about it is like, it's not, it's wall art.
It's the kind of shit you'd see in a hotel, except most of the kind of shit you'd see in a hotel, you would never look at or think about again.
Thomas Kincaid, there is something about them, right?
There is something interesting going on here.
I'm not saying that like it's good or artistically, you know, brilliant, but there's a reason different groups of people obsessively edit and modify Kincaid art.
Like there's a couple of different subcultures based around that.
You can find a lot of his work with like eldritch horrors and elder gods added in, as in, so he's going to show you this Thomas Kincaid lighthouse paired with Cthulhu.
Oh my God, that's gorgeous.
It works pretty well.
Yeah.
Like it's a much better painting when you throw Cthulhu in there.
Not mad at all.
I mean, what is it?
Yeah.
And while Thomas Kincaid stuff, they do a Star Wars imprint, there's been like a fan thing where people will take his borderline surreal landscapes and cabin paintings and turn them into the sites of colorful Star Wars battles.
As you can see here in this painting of a Thomas Kincaid cottage with a pair of ATATs.
Not bad.
Not bad.
I've seen that one before.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Surprisingly, they kind of fit in.
Like it is.
Yeah, that doesn't work.
It doesn't look jarring, right?
The worst part is that looks better than all the official Thomas Kincaid Star Wars.
So much better.
So much better.
God, like that is depressing.
Yeah.
Anyway, Thomas moves on to another art school after two years at Berkeley.
And it's somewhere in this period, like when he kind of leaves Berkeley to go to this other art school that there's a major shift in his personality.
Right around the same time he leaves, because the next art school he goes to is in Pasadena at age 20.
He undergoes what Sue Orlean described as a Christian awakening.
Quote, it changed his art.
It stopped being about his fears and anxieties and became optimistic and inspirational with themes like hometowns and perfect days and natural beauty.
And millions of people responded.
Now, this is what Sue writes in The New Yorker.
This is what Thomas claims.
I don't know that I think this is true.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not, right?
Because this is a very, if you've spent a lot of time at like revivals, if you've seen a lot of like Christian evangelical speeches, this is how they all go, right?
Usually, sometime when I'm in college, I was surrounded by this degeneracy, but then like I had this, and it changed everything.
Once I, you know, once I, you know, saw the truth and accepted Jesus, like my whole life was different, right?
That's how these stories go.
That's not really how real life usually works, right?
And it's not how art usually works.
But we'll start.
I'm going to tell you the real story, which is much more interesting and involves Ralph Bakshi.
Oh, God damn it.
Yeah, you're goddamn right.
But first, I'm going to tell the version of the story that Thomas Kincaid, once he becomes a business empire, wants everyone to believe.
Now I really want one of his paintings to have Fritz the Cat put in it.
So bad.
If only.
Or fire and ice.
Put a pin in that one, by the way.
Oh, no.
So Sue describes.
First, let's go with Thomas's story because this is what he wants people to believe.
So Sue Orlean, in her art profile for The New Yorker, describes how the company he created to tell his art tended to tell the story of Thomas's development from this point.
It's as good a story as you could hope for if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life's bounty.
Even the bad parts of the story are good because it's easier not to begrudge Kincaid his fortune when you were reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the Smarty Pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who was proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.
So basically, he's saying, like, yeah, I had this Christian awakening.
They wanted me to do all these sad paintings about my fears and nightmares and insecurities.
But I knew that real art, you know, it should uplift people.
It should be about values, these real classic American values.
And I broke with the art establishment then at age 20.
That is not at all what happens.
Demonstrably not the actual story.
So here's the actual story.
In the summer of 1980, Thomas Kincaid goes on a road trip with a friend, his buddy and fellow artist, James Gurney.
And they wind up in New York City, where Thomas talks his way into getting a book deal with James.
They publish A Guide to Sketching, which sold very well and is apparently a pretty good guide to sketch art.
Does the name James Gurney mean anything to you?
Not really, no.
Okay, good.
I think you'll recognize his work when we get to that point.
So this book that he and James writes is enough of a hit that it gets the attention of one of the country's most talented and insane artists, a man named Ralph Bakshi.
Now, if you have not seen his movies like Fritz the Cat and American Pop, Bakshi was a devotee of a type of animation called rotoscoping.
But he also, you know, rotoscoping involves these kind of like weird, it's a weird method of like filming actual people, but it also meshes in with traditional animation, which you use for the backgrounds, for like monsters and stuff.
Great, great shit.
He did the first two anime Lord of the Rings movies.
Yes, yes.
That's kind of probably his most well-known stuff.
And it's often like Bakshi style.
It's often garish.
It's often grotesque.
There's these distorted people and animals, but there's this kind of magnetism to his work nonetheless that a lot of people, including me, have always found like very intriguing.
Bakshi saw talent.
He's a very weird guy.
He's a very weird guy.
Especially if you consider his career started in Terry tunes, like Heckle and Jekyll and all that shit.
The 1960s Spider-Man cartoon.
Oh, shit.
And from that to doing Fritz.
Yeah.
The Spider-Man pointing at each other meme.
That's, I believe, Bakshi.
That's a Bakshi.
Okay.
Okay.
Interesting.
And then he started doing all of his adult cartoons in the 70s to the early 80s.
Yeah.
And then we got the You Will Never See Again 1989 Mighty Mouse cartoon.
Yeah.
With the cocaine reference.
Yeah.
I mean, Bakshi's blood was about 60% cocaine through the entirety of the 1980s.
John Chris Volushi was working on that one.
That's another bastard for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That'll be probably maybe our next episode, The Red and Stimpy guy.
Oh, Jesus.
But Bakshi sees talent in Thomas, and he hires him and Gurney to work on his new film, 1983's Fire and Ice, which you had Thomas Kincaid does a lot of the background art in Fire and Ice.
A lot of the environmental is drawn by Kincaid.
Yeah.
And by Gurney.
You know, Gurney does a good amount of that too.
And if you haven't seen Fire and Ice, folks, I recommend you do.
It's a great movie.
Maybe take some substances first if you're a substance-taking kind of person.
It's Bruce Vallejo, right?
Yeah, it's Vallejo, Bruce Vallejo, who did like a lot of the most iconic Conan art.
Sorry, Frank Frisetta.
Not Bruce Vallejo.
Was it Frank Frisetta?
Yeah, it's Frank Frisetta who did a lot of Conan art.
And it's written by a couple of guys who had done Conan the Barbarian comics, right?
So this movie, Fire and Ice is really, it's one of those like, one of these films that's kind of a prism because a lot of different careers break out after it, right?
There's a lot of people who are going to go on to do very different but influential things who get part of their start from Fire and Ice.
So Bakshi and Frizzetta handle the live action shots for the action sequences, while Gurney and Kincaid do a lot of the background paintings.
And the project gives Thomas a lot of, he credits in his official story, oh, I had this Christian awakening and it convinced me, you know, I'm this painter of light and whatnot.
But you see in Fire and Ice, a lot of him playing with fog and the way light affects landscapes.
But, you know, I've got a couple of clips in here for you.
In a way that is kind of like you see a lot of fog in Kincaid's later paintings.
You see a lot of the same kind of use of light.
Like it's not really surprising when you know this character.
The backgrounds are stunning.
I remember that movie.
He's very beautiful.
Yeah.
And again, Fire and Ice is one of these quietly influential films where a lot of people who made shit you love got their start.
Thomas's friend James Gurney, his co-author, goes on from this project to create, write, and illustrate the Dinatopia series.
That's who Gurney is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's James Gurney, right?
Who I was a big fan of that as a kid, right?
The layout artist for Fire and Light Ice was Peter Chung, who later created Aeon Flux.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Roy Thomas, one of the writers, created the character Vision for Marvel as well as Ghostwriter and fucking Morbius.
Oh my God.
Like, that's a lot of talent in one film.
It really is.
It really is.
Yeah.
We were this close to getting, oh, what's that?
What's that creepy sex criminal who's in the Morbius movie?
I'm spacing on his name.
Oh, Leto?
Jared Leto?
Yeah, we were this close to getting Jared Leto play Thomas Kincaid in a movie.
You know, there's still time.
There's still time, Leto.
He's too busy doing that weird cold thing that he does.
Oh, also, the other co-writer of Fire and Ice, Jerry Conway, co-created Killer Croc.
So, you know, again, a lot of influential people in this movie.
Jesus.
A lot of load-bearing parts of the culture come out of Fire and Ice.
Explains why it's a good movie, I guess.
Yeah, it's a great fucking awesome movie.
Yes.
So on one hand, Fire and Ice artists gave us a whole host of Marvel characters, several of whom have movies, Dinatopia and Aeon Flux.
And on the other hand, we have Thomas Kincaid, a man who 20 years later would be declared by a salon writer the George W. Bush of art.
This is before George W. Bush became the George W. Bush of art.
That's kind of hurt a little bit too.
Yeah, poor George W. Bush, the most, the greatest suffering artist today.
Truly, truly, no one has ever suffered more.
It would be really funny if he had like a, if he, if he'd gone like all full warhaul on it, like if George W. Bush were throwing these big warehouse parties in New York and like literally just like shooting up ketamine into his veins.
That's the George Bush we all deserve to get.
Instead, he's just rich and lives in Dallas.
So this version of the story, the one where, you know, Thomas Kincaid gets his big break on a massive animated production and he comes right away from it changed.
I think that's more the real story than the sudden Christian awakening thing.
After Fire and Ice, he starts working a lot more with light and landscapes and fog and mist, and he warps his style from a sort of restrained realism to this more fantastic and surreal look.
Now, Thomas likes the art he's making, but it isn't really selling because people don't really buy a lot of art, you know, like not enough that he can live the kind of life that he wants to live, right?
Of all the paintings I have sold, I've sold more prints than I've ever sold as paintings.
Yes.
Well, definitely made more money off prints than the actual originals.
You know, to be honest, Kincaid may be part of why the business does work that way.
Or at least, you know, maybe he's just, it's probably more accurate to say he realized that and figured out how to do it at scale very quickly.
So Thomas, he might have been able to make a place in the art world for himself or in Hollywood for himself, given enough time.
But he understood, number one, that like that kind of work was never going to be regular enough or profitable enough for him to get the kind of rich that he wanted to be as a former poor kid.
And he also is aware as he starts trying to sell and display his art that like critics don't like it.
They think that it looks either like cloyingly sweet or on the more fantastic side, like something you'd see in a Conan comic, right?
And that's not something like art critics are going to be bullish on.
No, they do not like that.
It's definitely the least favorite thing to come across.
Yeah.
And, you know, they're co-bad guys in this.
I try to, there's criticism.
I will try to repeat the criticism of Kincaid that I think is good and not just the stuff that's like clearly some guy who wishes that like he were still huffing Andy Warhol's fucking fumes.
There are definitely a lot of art critics who if you mention landscape, it just immediately goes to hatred.
Like it's like a switch hits them.
Yeah.
Same with certain mediums.
Like if you tell someone like, oh, I do watercolor, they're like, oh, okay, so you paint flowers.
Yeah.
No, well.
And you know, I wonder if, because we just talked about how there is some interesting stuff being done by people who modify Kincaid paintings.
I wonder if part of like the message there and the message with fire and ice is that this was never a man whose work should have existed on its own, right?
Like he could, he could be part of good things when he was a part of it, right?
When people were like using his backgrounds and adding and putting things on them, there was like a way in which like he was actually part of some interesting art, but on his own, you know, that's just not a lot there.
Anyway, he gets kind of enraged at an early age that his art is dismissed by these critics.
And Kincaid himself would always insist that like, because a big, one of the big criticisms he'll get is that his stuff is just too pleasant, right?
There's no emotion behind it.
There's nothing complex behind it.
And Kincaid develops this attitude that, well, art shouldn't be about complex emotions or pain.
Art exists to make people feel good.
And if it doesn't make people feel good, then it's not good art.
He later wrote, every element in my paintings, from the patch of sun in the foreground to the mists on a distant horizon, is an effort to summon back those perfect moments that hang in our minds as pictures of harmony.
My deepest desire is that my work will help people to aspire to the life those kinds of images evoke.
And I do think a valid criticism is that like, yeah, if you're focused on your art only making people feel good, well, that's not really very complicated or interesting art to a lot of people.
I don't know.
I don't disagree with him.
I think that there's a validity to this is just there to make you happy.
Yeah.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.
I do think, I disagree with him that all art has to make you feel good because my brain went to various Norman Rockwell paintings that were about integration.
They're very horrific images or the one about three pro-rights civil rights activists who were murdered.
He did a painting about them.
And like that didn't make me feel good, but damn, it was a hell of a painting.
And it really did evoke his rage at what happened to these young men.
Selling Comfort to Boomers00:08:20
And I think that's a great comparison to make because Norman Rockwell is a guy who gets compared to Kincaid a lot.
And there are some similarities in there's a lot of kind of 50s small town vibe aesthetics to both guys.
But Rockwell was always very willing to make art that made a political point and that had a motion behind it and that was trying to say something.
And the only thing Kincaid stuff has ever said is like, isn't it nice to be at home in your small town?
Aren't cabins great?
You know, here's a sunset.
People tend to dismiss Rockwell as like, oh, like very cute, kitschy stuff.
And he did that, but like he did do angrier paintings and talked about like, yeah.
Well, I mean, he did paintings for the Saturday Evening Post.
So a lot of them had to be about current events.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that that's kind of a good way to sort of divide the two men for folks who maybe aren't as familiar with their oeuvres is Kincaid is kind of violently against the idea that his art should mean anything but comfort.
And Rockwell was somebody who felt that art could make a point and could make people think and feel critically about things.
Yeah.
So Thomas Kincaid, the kind of what we're building to here is with this, this, he's kind of disgraced.
He has his brush with Hollywood, but it doesn't really take.
He gets disgruntled.
Critics don't like his work.
It's not selling.
And, you know, it's kind of interesting to me that from all of this, he comes to a series of understandings.
And it kind of, he kind of becomes the first man to understand and provide the underpinnings of what is now the most viral kind of art in our culture.
The stuff that we now call Facebook AI boomer art.
If you go on Facebook today, you'll get pages and pages of obvious AI art filled with comments from an even mix of old people and bots saying how happy it made them.
Thomas Kincaid is the first guy to realize that this is going to be a thing and figure out how to monetize on it before the internet's really a thing, before AI certainly is a thing.
Like you get, I'm showing you a couple examples, like this obviously fake baby and little dog.
This made me smile.
So sweet.
You know, this soldier, no one is thanking me.
No one thank is for service.
Yeah.
There's a crying soldier saluted with his back turned to an American family.
There's a baby crying in a card.
It's like a little deranged.
The baby is like, there's not a steering wheel.
It's the baby head.
It's a deranged piece of art.
And, you know, Kincaid stuff was always a lot simpler than this, but it's the, you know, you, you get this sort of like, here's a sad soldier saluting at a flag, you know, walking home.
It's always vaguely patriotic, but without like, yeah.
I scrolled.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
I'm building to like Kincaid stuff and all of this weird AI boomer, it's all stuff that's vaguely patriotic.
It's usually paired with text.
AI Jesus.
Yeah.
AI Jesus.
Does Kinka have cat ears?
Yeah.
It's got cat ears in the last photo.
But you almost, you see, the kind of shine to them reminds me a lot of Kinkade's stuff too.
Like, and I wonder if that's just that there's so much of his DNA in all of these models.
I like the one with the baby.
They're all the ones with the baby selfie.
Yes, but the one with the baby with Jesus and the baby have one hand and they're taking a selfie because babies can hold things like that.
Yeah, and Jesus has a Lenovo smartphone from 2016.
Yes.
I desperately want to Photoshop a nail into that Jesus' wrist.
I don't know why.
It's just driving me out of the body.
Where's the stick moda?
Fucking AI.
The kiss is unsettling.
It's all unsettling.
It all shares for the same reason that Thomas's stuff was popular, which is that you get these kind of, when there is a message, it's usually a very vague level of like conservative grievance, you know, over the state of the world.
But mostly it's either stuff that makes you feel good or stuff that makes you feel nostalgic and doesn't really have anything else going for it.
And he recognized that like this is something just as like this stuff has absolutely dominated people's Facebook walls, boomer, Facebook walls, his art dominated the literal walls in their house, right?
Like there's a connection between these two things, between the kind of AI slop that goes viral and between Thomas Kincaid and the way he used light and color and the kinds of things he picks as subjects for his art.
This sort of like cozy scenes of American and family life with incoherent patriotism and off-putting hyper commercialized Christianity, right?
All of that stuff together is Thomas Kinkade and he is he sees how much potential there is in this, right?
That the real way to make a lot of money isn't in making art that you're trying to impress critics with or sell to some rich guy.
It's making stuff like this that you can tug at whatever it is in the brains of these conservative boomers and make fucking all of the money on earth.
And I can't stop myself because as soon as I started really digging into more of Kincaid's work, I started thinking about all of this AI shit that every time I hop onto Facebook to get in, you know, get in touch with a family member or something that I haven't seen in 10 years, I see a bunch of this shit.
I see endless seas of this shit.
And so I am kind of, I'm going to kind of repeatedly make reference to it.
And I think it's worth looking into when we kind of compare to Thomas saying, I think that my art should be about making people feel good, that that's all that, you know, it really matters, right?
I don't want anything more complex than that.
That's exactly what's going on with the actual human beings who are generating this AI art, right?
404 Media has done some really good reporting on the origins of these baffling viral images, and a huge number of them seem to originate from India.
They're spread via copy-pasted prompts and telegram groups and are often a little incoherent because authors will run the prompts through text-to-speech in Hindi.
That's why a lot of like the language doesn't quite work.
And there are even influencers who will like teach people how to put together viral prompts for money.
And their explanations of what images work and why are very Kinkade, right?
Here's one quote from one of these guys.
Photos of poor people are good.
Anything that touches the heart, cute babies, children.
This is getting us a lot of good engagement.
People in the U.S. and in foreign countries, they love their pets and other animals.
There are many pet lovers who live there, right?
It's just all of this stuff that gives you these kind of vague good vibes feelings, right?
Thomas Kincaid is the proof of concept for how much money there is in this sort of thing.
That's why all of the, that's why there's this cottage industry and generating shit like this.
Yeah.
Cottage industry, that's a good for his paintings.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
I mean, also, I think part of it is like, it doesn't just makes you feel good.
It makes you feel safe.
Like it touched the whole how many of us have like older relatives that post like pictures of remember back when you knew things were okay and you can leave your door unlocked and it's like hey, no, I don't, and like parents about that.
Like no, we always lock our doors.
Yeah, like my dad lived out in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, like we still lock our doors and trust people in cold blood came out when you know like yeah yeah, it's definitely.
It harkens to that whole, like the rose-tinted glass view that I'm beginning to see Logen Xers start also throwing out there.
Like oh, back when we drink out of the water hose and our parents let's play the sunset like yeah, that wasn't great yeah, you were just a child, but it wasn't like a better time.
But that, that feeling that we didn't used to have to lock our doors, like Kincaid in 1990, bottles that feeling right and finds a way to sell it back to people at scale.
Right, and that is, that is the source of his wealth.
Speaking of selling things Robert yeah, speaking of the source of our wealth, here's some advertisers.
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Destroying the World with AI00:03:19
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You he related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny with me each night, each morning, say you love me, you know I, so come hang out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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Ah, and we're back.
So, Highway Patrol.
Obviously, Thomas Kincaid did not foresee AI art.
He was not trying to lead us there, but his instincts kind of made it very clear how much money there is in pushing out this slop.
So he is, I think, he counts as a granddaddy to this.
Turning Art into an Investment00:10:34
And I want to read a quote from The Daily Beast kind of talking about how he thought of his art.
Kincaid thought the art world had become detached from the public, and he saw himself as the person to return it to an artist-as-servant model where painters affirmed rather than challenged social values.
His hero was Andy Warhol, who he felt had rescued art from insularity and infused it with iconography that meant something to ordinary people.
What Warhol did with soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, Kincaid thought he could do with Eden-inspired garden scenes and Cotswold cottages.
And that's wild to me that he's like listing Warhol as an influence because I think Andy Warhol would be deeply, deeply disturbed by that fact, which I'm fine.
I mean, yeah, like I can say Lichtenstein and appreciating it because he was all about the industrial system for art.
But Warhol, I don't know, like the guy who did the movie that got him shot.
We'll see.
Oh, yeah, he did.
Oh, Andy Warhol.
Yeah.
Good job, Andy.
Yeah, great guy.
So by 1989, Thomas Kincaid is married.
He's starting a family and he can't get by on piecework and the very occasional sale of a painting.
So he reaches out.
He has this idea.
I want to sell prints of my, you know, cloying paintings to a mass middle American audience.
And he reaches out to this guy, Ken Rash, a California entrepreneur.
And he's like, hey, I'm already selling five grand in prints every month.
And I think with some capital behind me, I could start a real business.
Now, this is fraud.
He's committing fraud here because his actual sales are closer to zero dollars.
But Rash, I'm not sure if Rash just gets lucky or if he's got some sort of entrepreneur brain and he sees the potential, but he gives Thomas $35,000 in startup capital.
Jesus.
Now, this is a story that should end in a series of lawsuits and Thomas fleeing the country.
But to everyone's surprise but theirs, this works.
This is a great investment.
The fact that Thomas has to launch a con to start it does not harm the business in any way.
It shoots off like a rocket.
Some of the very American, though.
You got to admit, that's just like.
Yeah.
I started a con and it worked.
It's the origin of almost every fortune.
Voting for Trump, wouldn't he?
Oh, of course.
No, yes, absolutely.
Yes.
He's a hardcore conservative.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, some of this business had to do with Kincaid's personal allure, right?
That's part of why this works.
He is a charismatic guy.
He's good at again.
I remember that picture of him with a fucking mullet.
I mean, what a lore.
Yeah.
I would pull my child away from this man on the street.
I don't.
Yeah, but you're not, it's that, there's this weird revival thing, too, where, like, if you're doing, yeah, I grew up in Southern Baptists.
I remember going to a bunch of revivals at football stadiums.
Okay.
A lot of money.
It's always that slick suit and the slick back hair and folks.
Well, folks, y story to make all the older people feel a bit better.
And then, like, let's talk about how we've lost our way.
Or, or you can be, I think what he does is he's the guy who looks a little bit on the edge.
Like, he might have at one point been, you know, more of a kind of like a little dangerous, right?
But like, now he's filled with the spirit of the Lord.
Right.
Yeah.
Like, I was, I was in the, it's that Alex Jones things.
Like, I've been in the depths of Hollywood.
I know the real evils, you know, because he was in a couple of link letter movies.
Um, I think that's probably like how all the times we had like revivals that it was like Elvis's stepbrother or half brother who showed up as a speaker.
Yeah.
Talking about like, I know the evils of this.
Like, dude, who the fuck are you?
You just know that that's the only money for Elvis's stepbrother today.
Yeah.
Uh, so he and Rash name their company Lighthouse Publishing, uh, and they list their, they state their goal, like the company mission is to engulf as many hearts as possible with art, which in a very Kincaid fashion is vaguely similar or sinister.
Um, there's a problem though.
Thomas has realized correctly that a lot of middle Americans want the kind of things that signal wealth, like having original artwork hanging in your home.
Uh, but you can't really make actual paintings that people want to buy at a rate fast enough to make serious money selling them to people who are not insanely rich and using that art as a tax shelter, right?
If you're selling your originals, you can only sell so much art.
And if you're selling your originals to people who aren't rich, you're just not going to get rich.
Uh, but the value of art is in its exclusivity.
And Thomas realized that when you're dealing with people who aren't in the out who aren't in the art world, it's easy to fake exclusivity because people are dumb.
So he starts utilizing a printing process that mimics the look of a real painting, as Sue Orlene describes.
A digital image could also be soaked in water, peeled off the paper, and affixed to a stretched canvas so that it showed the texture of the canvas in a way in the way a real painting would, right?
So that's step one.
But a print that looks like it has the texture of a painting is still just a print.
So if you're going to sell thousands of them, people aren't going to pay a lot for them.
So Thomas has another idea.
He has to make them unique, but in a way that he can mass produce.
So he hires and trains up an entire factory full of what he calls master highlighters to come in and add small bits of paint.
Like they'll paint over a single tree on the print or a little patch of snow or a rock or something.
And now you technically have an original piece of art.
Now you've got something you can market, not just as decor for the home, but as an investment vehicle to rubes, right?
And that's the key to the Thomas Kincaid story.
It's not just that his art comforts people, it's that he convinces them that they will make money if they buy it, just like all of the rich con artists they admire.
That's a great.
This is an investment.
It's an investment, but like it's not one of those scary paintings that you hear about if elites like.
It's a painting that you love that makes you feel safe and you can pass it on to your children.
It'll be worth so much money.
It's going to keep appreciating value because look, somebody painted that tree in the corner.
So this is an original, unique piece of work.
There's not another one like it anywhere in the world.
This is a safe place to park your children's inheritance.
And, you know, he's not just selling these through, they launch a series of galleries, right?
Which are art retail establishments, right?
They only, initially, they only sell Thomas's work.
Um, and they they are they are operated individually, kind of like a McDonald's franchise.
So, like independent people franchise Kincaid galleries, so he gets them taking on the financial risk.
He gets he's convincing other people to take on the financial risk of building a brick and mortar or of operating a brick and mortar to sell his work.
But he gets a cut of every sale that they make, and he'll like send his master highlighters out to individual stores to do live events.
He'll go do speaking engagements and sign prints there.
All of this creates a pretty viable business.
And I, I really need to lean into how much of a scam it is.
So, I want to quote again from that New Yorker article, which it also reminds me again of Liechtenstein, who has people who create art for him, but he got to put his name on it.
Yes, yes, and there's other guys who have done parts of it.
I think the degree to which Kincaid turns this into like an actual like factory mechanized business based entirely around him, especially at the time he does it, is fairly unique.
Again, he is playing with things.
He's not the only guy doing stuff, he's not the only guy who ever does this highlighting thing, but he is the first to do it at scale and make tens of millions of dollars off of it, right?
This becomes more standard as a result of him.
And I, to highlight kind of the degree to which these people are being scammed into thinking they're buying an investment, I want to, in that New Yorker article, it quotes the manager of one of Thomas's galleries talking a customer through a purchase.
You're building a great portfolio, they're nice investments, and this one's almost sold out and they do have a history of appreciation.
We have some secondary market pieces here.
This, this one, Julianne's Cottage, was released for a few hundred dollars in 1992, and now it's $3,730.
So, that's a big part of the promise.
This will appreciate.
You're really making money, you know.
And I think that that is a key aspect of it.
It's not just that these people like comforting art, it's that they're being convinced.
Their greed is being played with too, right?
Oh, God, it's beanie babies.
Yeah, it is.
It's exactly beanie babies.
And it happens.
The fact that this all happens in the 90s, this is happening.
Kincaid is really hitting his stride at the same point that beanie babies become a thing.
Pokemon 2019.
Also, the 90s worthy collection.
Like, you know, let's win the exact market.
Exactly.
Everything's baseball cards are really big in the early 90s.
And he is, he is influenced by that.
He is paying attention to how collectibles are going, and he is applying that to his own art.
Highlighted paintings are being sold as studio proofs.
Kincaid himself would even do a small number of highlighted copies where he's painting over prints of his own paintings.
The normal highlights could start as low as $1,500, while as Kincaid's highlights, and again, he's just like painting a tree or something on a painting he already made, would go for $30,000 or $40,000.
But he kept a hold of most of his originals, which helped add to the perception of value for his prints, right?
And he would cut off artificially, he would stop selling individual prints at varying times.
He would make sure they were limited runs, which again, it's the same.
He's learning from beanie babies from collectible cards.
That's what adds to the value in the secondary market that gets people buying in because they think, well, I can get rich off of this painting.
Maybe people will want it a lot in 30 years for some reason, and then it'll really prove to have been a good investment.
It's all speculation, and there's no proof that it'll have any value.
No, no.
And in fact, it doesn't.
These are terrible investments.
And this is, by the way, he, when I call him a con artist, he is going to be found in court to have, or his company will be found in court to have conned people.
Limited Runs and Secondary Markets00:05:08
Yes.
Thomas himself is dropped from the case.
The company he starts is found to have misrepresented the business opportunity that Kincaid Prince represented.
He would have been in one of Trump's cabinets alone.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, he would have been like the minister of the interior or some shit.
Speaking of cabinet positions, Randy, when I'm elected president, let's see.
What am I going to make you?
What am I going to make you?
Sec death.
You're in charge of the army, Randy.
Oh, fuck yeah.
Yeah, you got it.
This is about to get way worse.
Figure out a war and start it.
I mean, it's America.
We can figure out a goddamn war.
Yeah, we need smaller than Afghanistan, but bigger than Grenada.
You know, really find us one of those sweet spots and let's just start sending in Marines, you know?
Greenland's had too fucking good for two years.
I think we could take Greenland.
Yeah, I think we could take Greenland, you know?
A lot of minerals.
Yeah.
They probably have some presidents.
We can call the dictator.
Yeah, let's do it.
All right, everybody.
Evans, I don't know, let's say 2032.
It's time for Greenland to pay.
Wow.
Randy, do you have any place on the internet that you exist?
Yes, unfortunately, quite a few places.
My main comic, Something Positive, is at somethingpositive.net.
I also have mousetrapped comic.blog.
Also, comicskingdom.com/slash Popeye.
Every Sunday is a new Popeye strip.
Come see why so many of your 70 and 60-year-old uncles and aunts fucking hate me because I ruined Popeye by including people of color.
Hell yeah.
Well, check out Randy.
Check out us on YouTube or not.
If you want to continue listening to it, you can just listen to it.
I promise most of the episodes we do will not be about painters.
But when we do episodes about artists, it helps to have a video.
Any episode about Hitler is about a painter.
It is.
It is.
You know what?
We're going to launch our pure art criticism episode of Hitler.
I mean, honestly.
Compare Hitler and John Wayne Gacy's and how would they match up?
I think they would have been friends, actually, if they'd gotten the opportunity.
I think Hitler would have really liked him if he'd gotten to know him.
One of history's great tragedies, The Friendships That Never Were.
Wow.
There's a good buddy coming in.
There's a couple history novel there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hitler and John Wayne Gacy.
Solving crimes.
Yeah, I want Hitler and John Wayne Gacy as like detectives in New Orleans solving crimes.
The short story that will finally get me canceled, the Hitler Gacy files.
Don't send the podcast.
I'm worried for you.
Okay.
Bye.
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No, no, no.
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