On The Despised Art Of Thomas Kinkade (original) (raw)
The Interpretation of Christian Symbolism in the Painting of Thomas Kinkade
2021
The work of Thomas Kinkade is the subject of a discussion about contemporary Christian art in general. The artist's commercial success and the enduring popularity of his work have attracted the attention of both art historians and theologians. Among the issues discussed are the place of Christian art in modern mass culture, the role of religious symbolism in secular art, and its rethinking in connection with the spiritual needs of modern society. The most difficult question is the acceptability of the artist's image of "the world without the Fall" in the context of the Christian worldview, which is the central theme in Kinkade's landscapes. The article examines the most common points of view about these problems, analyzes possible approaches to the estimation of the artist's creative heritage in the context of visual theology.
Interpretation of Christian Symbolism in the Painting of Thomas Kinkade
Journal of Visual Theology / Визуальная теология, 2021
The work of Thomas Kinkade is the subject of a discussion about contemporary Christian art in general. The artist's commercial success and the enduring popularity of his work have attracted the attention of both art historians and theologians. Among the issues discussed are the place of Christian art in modern mass culture, the role of religious symbolism in secular art, and its rethinking in connection with the spiritual needs of modern society. The most difficult question is the acceptability of the artist's image of "the world without the Fall" in the context of the Christian worldview, which is the central theme in Kinkade's landscapes. The article examines the most common points of view about these problems, analyzes possible approaches to the estimation of the artist's creative heritage in the context of visual theology.
Aesthetic Investigations, 2021
Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues (distinguishing works of art from other kinds of things), epistemic problems (the experience of beauty, the standards of critical judgment), and questions of value (the difference between good and bad taste). This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy of art in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define.
What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art
(Peer-reviewed Journal) Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, 2019
[Peer-reviewed article by two scientific committee members of the magazine] This essay seeks to provide an idea of the basis of the main theories of contemporary art criticism. It begins with the assumed knowledge and tradition of the Academies of Fine Art, with their ideal of beauty and classical structure. The importance of such traditional references has its origin in the Renaissance in the 16th century, in Florence with Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in Haarlem with Karel van Manda (1548-1606) and, above all, in Paris with Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) of the French Royal Academy, which established the first strict rules for the fine arts and was a reference for Europe as a whole. Academies of Fine Art were established in the major European capitals, and from the 19th century, in the Americas and worldwide. The themes and rules presented over the course of history always related to the functions of art and the legacy of classical thought as tradition. However, values and ruptures, ethics, ideologies and political ideals, and the progress of science have conditioned the fundamental importance of the renewal of Western thought. This essay concerns the decline of tradition in the arts, the lack of ideologies guiding modern art, and the transition to contemporary art. The main theories that marked this transition period-20th and 21st century-are analyzed with respect to the art, its criticism, and the theories to the understanding and transformative sense of artistic creation. Such creativity usually appears strange or transgressive to the public and primarily to be seeking a legitimation of the artist's autonomy of choice and freedom of thought. On the whole, this essay presents the main aesthetics notions relating to the critical analysis of traditional European cultures and, more recently, American ones too. American culture, in which the languages of art are based, is analyzed for its effect on occidental philosophy. Both theories of art and contemporary aesthetics are emphasized so as to better understand the work of art's current aim with regard to the discernment of theoretical, prescriptive, and ideological thinking in the visual arts. Cite as: Wagner, Christiane. 2019. “What Matters in Contemporary Art? A Brief Statement on the Analysis and Evaluation of Works of Art.” Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine, nº 1, (March): 68-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5168105
From Tomas Kulka on Kitsch Art to Art as a Singular Rule
ESPES: 8 pp. 17-27 (2)., 2019
The article takes as its starting point the work of Tomas Kulka on Kitsch and Art to further a philosophical move aiming at the very logical core of the question of art. In conclusion, the idea of Singular Rule is offered as capturing the defining logic of art. In so doing, the logical structure of a singular rule is uncovered and in that also the sense in which the idea of singular rule both explains and justifies the role that art plays in our life. In his Kitsch and Art Tomas Kulka extends Karl Popper's refutation principle in science to the arts. He asks of a true work of art to be open to “refutation” by way of evaluating it against its own admissible alterations or variations. An admissible alteration according to Kulka is a change or a modification of the work that does not “shatter its basic perceptual gestalt”. In considering alterations that are aesthetically better, worse or neutral with respect to the original picture, Kulka offers us a rational reconstruction of key...
Published in Art History versus Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2005) ed. James Elkins. This very short paper argues the recent contextualist art history (and semiotic approaches) reduce the made visual artwork to a mode of consumerism determined by western prejudices. Against this, it is argued that to make a visual image involves acting on reality in a way that changes the existing relation of subject and object of experience at all levels.This is an aesthetic transformation with transcultural significance. The approach taken here is developed in much greater detail in Chapter 1 of my book Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. Another book - The Transhistorical Image -develops these ideas further still.
To My Wife most modern scholarship has made available, the idea behind the whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with the personality of the writer and by the character of his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly." In these matters judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The writing of it is in itself a work of art-as the style of Élie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the emotions of art can tell others which are the great works and make clear the collective poem formed by their history. It is precisely because Élie Faure is adding something to that poem that he has the right to tell us of its meaning.
From Tomas Kulka on Kitsch and Art to Art as a Singular Rule
ESPES 8 (2):17-27., 2019
Abstract: The article takes as its starting point the work of Tomas Kulka on Kitsch and Art to further a philosophical move aiming at the very logical core of the question of art. In conclusion, the idea of Singular Rule is offered as capturing the defining logic of art. In so doing, the logical structure of a singular rule is uncovered and in that also the sense in which the idea of singular rule both explains and justifies the role that art plays in our life. In his Kitsch and Art Tomas Kulka extends Karl Popper's refutation principle in science to the arts. He asks of a true work of art to be open to “refutation” by way of evaluating it against its own admissible alterations or variations. An admissible alteration according to Kulka is a change or a modification of the work that does not “shatter its basic perceptual gestalt”. In considering alterations that are aesthetically better, worse or neutral with respect to the original picture, Kulka offers us a rational reconstruction of key aesthetics concepts such as unity, complexity and intensity. His reconstruction will show that a work of kitsch does not qualify as art in direct analogy to a proposition that cannot qualify as scientific if it is not (potentially) refutable. Kitsch cannot be “refuted” by any of its possible alterations as they are all of equal aesthetic value. This explains the aura of empty perfectionism that accompanies the experience of kitsch since the work of kitsch does not carry any promise for improvement nor does it show itself superior to any of its possible alterations. Notwithstanding Kulka’s novel analysis, its premise we must note is grounded in the work of art impressing on us a single basic perceptual gestalt with respect to which an alteration can qualify as admissible. But in acknowledging the possibility of a gestalt-switch or the fact that the work of art can impress on us a variety of mutually-exclusive perceptual gestalts, Kulka's analysis loses the logical anchor necessary for it to work. However, in what might look at first sight as an unrecoverable logical deficiency, we find an anchor to a novel analysis to the question of art. This is our analysis to the idea of art as a singular rule. Indeed, the concept of a singular rule - a rule onto itself which has exclusively itself as its own argument - must strike us as paradoxical. But in offering to reconstruct the work of art through the complementary concepts of background and figure - to match respectively the how and the what of the work - we are able to provide a structural resolution to the idea of singular rule as what defines art. In this we believe we deliver a definitive answer to the question of art. Keywords: Tomas Kulka, Representation, Nelson Goodman, Kitsch, Art.