Democratic Art at Its Finest

I now feel fully justified in my utter dislike of Thomas Kinkade’s “art.” Yesterday, I received an advertisement through the mail telling me that for just 3 low payments of $19.95 plus $7.99 shipping, I can start a charter subscription for the illuminated “John Deere Creek Village” collection. It is the “first-ever village inspired by Thomas Kinkade and John Deere.” Many of you have already heard my diatribe about Kinkade’s work—how it does not aspire to greatness, celebrates virtue in isolation, exists only for its prettiness, and does not encourage people to love truly beautiful things. You may or may not agree with me on those points. However, I submit to this evidence that Thomas Kinkade does not work as an artist so much as a brilliant capitalist and businessmen (not that the two are mutually exclusive). He is selling something that he knows people will buy and is increasing his market to include the tractor loving community.

May I say that Thomas Kinkade is the paragon of democratic art?

Let me not give my opinion only, but bring forth Alexis de Tocqueville.

“This leads me to speak of those arts that have been named par excellence fine arts.
I do not believe that the necessary effect of the democratic social state and institutions is to diminish the number of men who cultivate the fine arts; but these causes powerfully influence the manner in which they are cultivated. Since most of those who had already contracted the taste for the fine arts are becoming poor, and on the other hand, many of those not yet rich are beginning to conceive a taste for the fine arts by imitation, the quantity of consumers generally increases, and very rich and very refined consumers become rarer. In the fine arts, something analogous then takes place to what I already brought out when I spoke of the useful arts. They multiply their works diminish the merit of each of them.
No longer able to aim at the great, they seek the elegant and pretty; they strive less for reality than for appearance.
In aristocracies, a few great pictures are done and in democratic countries, a multitude of small paintings. In the first they raise statues of bronze and in the second they pour out statues of plaster.
When I arrived for the first time in New York by the part of the Atlantic Ocean named the East River, I was surprised to perceive along the bank at some distance from town a certain number of small palaces of white marble, several of which had an antique architecture; the next day, having been to consider more closely the one that had particularly attracted my regard, I found that its wall were whitewashed bricks and its columns painted wood. It was the same with all the monuments I had admired the day before.
In addition, the democratic social state and institutions give to all the imitative arts certain particular tendencies that are easy to point out. They often turn them from the depiction of the soul to apply themselves only to the body; and they substitute the representation of motions and sensations for that of sentiments and ideas; finally, in place of the ideal they put the real.
I doubt that Raphael made as profound a study of the smallest springs of the human body as have the draftsmen of our day. He did not attach the same importance as they to rigorous exactitude on this point, for he claimed to surpass nature. He wanted to make of man something that was superior to man. He undertook to embellish beauty itself.
[Jacques-Louis] David and his students were, on the contrary, as good anatomists and painters. They represented the models they had before their eyes marvelously well, but it was rare that they imagined anything beyond that; they followed nature exactly, whereas Raphael sought better than that. They left us an exact depiction of man, but the first made us glimpse divinity in his works.
One can apply even to the choice of subject what I have said of the manner of treating it.
The painters of the Renaissance ordinarily sought great subjects above themselves, or far from their times, that left a cast course to their imaginations. Our painters often put their talent to reproducing exactly the details of private life that they have constantly before their eyes, and they copy from all sides small objects of which they have only too many originals in nature.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. The University of Chicago Press, p. 442