Monday, March 06, 2006

Piss Christ 2

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.
The Los Angeles Times investigates Christian painting superstar Thomas Kinkade:
In litigation and interviews with the Los Angeles Times, some former gallery owners depict Kinkade, 48, as a ruthless businessman who drove them to financial ruin at the same time he was fattening his business associates' bank accounts and feathering his nest with tens of millions of dollars.
In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.
"He had been falling down, and he fell off the stool, and he was laying on the ground and just looked up at her and flipped her the bird and told her, you know, just to 'F you' several times," Dandois testified.
"He approached [her] and he palmed her breasts and he said, 'These are great tits!'"
"But you've got to remember," [Kinkaid] said, "I'm the idol to these women who are there. They sell my work every day, you know. They're enamored with any attention I would give them. I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me. I don't recall what was going on that night."
You can see his work here.

[Via Metafilter]

6 comments:

Lew Scannon said...

Great artists do not make millions of dollars, they starve and scrimp and are never recognized in their own time.

Anonymous said...

I loathe Kinkade. I once worked for a gift company that licensed his work and I resented every minute I had to spend thinking about his cheaply sentimental, sterlized, whitebread work or how we were going to help line his pockets some more. Most of all, I hated the way he trademarked the phrase, "Painter of Light." "Oh yeah, fuck those impressionist guys. I'M the painter of light. I have a document that proves it. You want to say Monet was a painter of light? Sorry, that's me, and it will cost you if you say different."

Stang said...

Now he can trademark the phrase, "Great tits!"

Sleestak said...

Thom's Bible-themed water slide park

Stang said...

Nice one, Sleestak. Here's Thom's La-Z-Boy!

The works of Dllee said...

Karen de la Carriere stated:
"He is a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci or Monet. There is no one in our generation who can paint like that."

uh, excuse me, but it was andy warhol who urinated as part of his work. is this guy good? yes. did he forget where he came from? yes. is he a modern day Da Vinci or Monet? NO. that is an insult to those masters.