Behind the Bastards - Part One: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Robert sits back down with Randy Milholland to discuss Thomas Kinkade, the most financially successful American artist and con-man.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CAUSOR MEDIA. 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 Milhall. And Randy, have you ever been expected, suspected of a series of violent crimes?

Only a triple rigid sign. Oh, that's a good crime to be suspected for. Well, Randy, today we're gonna 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, 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

a Legolas T-shirt? I did not know that you were wearing a Legolas t-shirt. I am. I am. I am. I am. I am. Oh.

Randy, welcome back to the show. Yes, 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. This is true. 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. 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? What? Hitler. Hitler was a painter. My job titles head of creative, I feel attacked. Yeah, yeah, well, you're about to be attacked if our listeners do the job. Anyway, whatever.

Robert. Randy. Ah! What do you know, what have you heard about Thomas Kincade? I know he's dead. Yes, yes. And yes, despite being dead. That's gonna be a real highlight of these episodes.

Ha ha ha! I know that despite being dead, his signature still appears in brand new art, which leads me to think there's some type of assembly line going on. That's really it. I think my grandmother had one of his prints and that's about it.

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 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? You know, 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 takes. My brain went straight to- We'll see how about it now. It went up to Ford, my brain went straight to. We'll see how long it takes. But my brain goes to like Ford and all the anti-Semitisms. I'm like, can't wait to see what Pample is taking 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. God fucking damn it. 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 Kinkade, the painter of light. Anyway, here it fucking goes. Oh, how much? 8,500, something like Kincaid, the painter of light. Anyway, here it fucking goes. 8,500, something like that. Pretty normal script. Yeah.

It's a lot to write about Thomas Kincaid though. Anyway, cold open, closed. For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Lonti marked the beginning of the end.

It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday.

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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've 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 gonna 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. Yeah, so 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 kind of a little- Okay, they thought that's just me, because I'm like, that tractor is up to his- Yeah, that tractor is tiny. That truck also, even with the distance looks tiny. You've got a soldier walking towards 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. Just give it the age of the truck. Oh, they tied it yellow around the tree.

We're gonna run the tree. So you know, it's, 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 homey, but makes it feel like a cabin from a fucking Sam Raimi movie. Like it feels like there's a devil inside there and the soldiers come back home having just survived the war to confront the evil

that's devoured his family. He does have the Necronomicon in that backpack. He's carrying it. 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. Like those little- That's the best way to describe it, Randy, is if you've ever had a relative

who like every year around 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 cross, like 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 kinda has. Yeah, that's very unpleasant. I don't know why that bothers me so much, but it does. 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

concave 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 wanna hear someone smarter than me describe it,

I wanna quote Joan Didion's description of Thomas Kinkade's style. A Kinkade 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 lure the 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 breakfast, at least two of which in Placeville, the Chinchester McKee House and the Cumbleback Blair House, claim to have been the models for Kinkade 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.

But- Suddenly I want a Kinkade 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 of the, any account, one of the wealthiest artists of any medium ever to live. He died worth somewhere between 50 and $70 million. So you were talking about like, basically no one in the arts ever makes that kind of money, right?

Like he is a, yeah. Only person I can think of who probably came close and may have surpassed was like Charles Schultz in his lifetime. Schultz, Jim Davis maybe. Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah.

Yeah, I think you're probably right that like you have to go to some of the most, 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 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 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, most painters, if they get rich, do it because they make something that gets, 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 it's counting stuff like this is always kind of a crap shoot, but one credible estimate says that sort of at the height of his popularity, something like one in 10 American homes

had a Thomas Kinkade 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. The 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, he's turned into, this is not really as much of what it was for the most part when he was alive, but it's just kind of turnedmm. He's turned into, this is not really as much of what it was 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 gonna talk about like how he actually made that profitable. Cause 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. That's how he got this successful. The fact that this worked says a lot about our country, which is why we're telling this story in the year of our Lord 2024. As we watch an election where one side is largely propped up by an alliance of used car dealers, crypto scammers, and fucking multi-level marketing con men. So yeah. You might be being generous on that one.

Yeah. Yeah. William Thomas Kincaid III was born January 19th, 1958 in Sacramento, California, better known as the very crack of hell itself. Have you been to Sacramento much? No, I've not been to Sacramento. 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 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 fabulist, 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's brother Patrick- That's most painters. That's most artists. That's most painters. That's Los Alamos artists. That's most painters, yes. Yeah.

Drunken 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 sand 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. But it's a situation-

What an embarrassing way to describe it. I know, it's a real bleak. Like he's like a guest star in like a TV sitcom. Like once a season, he'll come in for an episode. Play with 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 in Austin Powers. And I just have to, I'm not gonna 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. The cat! The cat! The cat! I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at your sad childhood, but that's pretty funny. No, that's kind of like, that's amazing. Yeah.

That feels like some arrested development level shit right there. Yeah. 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 mom with two kids. No, absolutely not. 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 gonna grow up feeling that way, right? Yeah, I mean, that was kind of given with the Christoph Asch's shit. Right.

I mean, I feel sympathy and empathy for her because- Yeah, it's tough. You don't, it's gotta 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 pretty brutal. Yeah, yeah, and I get why you would hide that. I understand like the shame of it. You know, I'm thinking back to my own child

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 not how he's going to,

Patrick is gonna grow up thinking about this sort of, or that's not how Thomas and Patrick are gonna grow up thinking about this sort of stuff. Or that's not how Thomas and Patrick are gonna 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 creative. Yeah, 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 rough. That's a trauma. You're trying to make sure your kid doesn't... She sounds like a great mom, to be honest. Yeah, she sounds like she did her very best. You know, you can't guarantee kids are gonna 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, 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 immediately.

Oh, he's one of those, oh no. 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 desperate 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. Cause I've done, 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 young age, he understood his value. I just also know where this is going. Yeah. I'm not happy about it. Yeah. Yeah. Now Thomas was so, was promising enough as an artist

that he started attracting mentors as a teenager. One of them was a prominent artist named Glen 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. Now, the story of Glen and Thomas is a load bearing piece of the Thomas Kinkade story.

So much so that in 2008, it became the subject of a Christmas biopic titled Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage. Peter O'Toole plays Glen and in a shocking twist, Thomas Kinkade is played by Jared Padalecki, AKA the less interesting brother from Supernatural. Really? Really? Really?

I was shocked as hell to see that. That's not where I thought that was gonna go. Neither did I. It's like right at the start of the series, Jared Padalecki too. So I- 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. But he's Rory Gilmore's worst boyfriend.

I will die on that. This really speaks to the differences between us. Yeah, that hair. Look at the hair on that movie. Also, by any count, 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 adolescent

or your young adulthood. But also like, I'm sorry, Thomas Kincaid, you don't look like Jared Padalecki. Look, what are we talking about here? Thomas Kincaid looks, oh no, he looks nothing alike. Absolutely, Sophie, pull that up because the people need to see. He looks like a toe with a beard. He does not look like 2006 Jared Padalecki.

No, no, he doesn't have a chin. 2006 future Walker Texas Ranger, disastrous idea for a reboot, Jared Padalecki. Oh my God. It's so funny. I'm looking at pictures. Oh, there's a picture of King Kade with a mullet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He looks like he can tell. That man knows the street value of meth at sight. 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

in trailer park version of Glenn Shadix, who was Otho in Beetlejuice. What a very specific comparison. You know, thank you, Randy. That's who should have fucking played him, Weston Pleece Shadix, because he was an amazing actor. God damn.

Yeah, and so anyway- Let's do an ad-bake real quick. Yeah, speaking of Jared Padalecki, this podcast is sponsored by DeviantArt. Oh, I thought you were gonna say, your worst boyfriend. No, deep 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.

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on Behind the Bastards. Here's some ads. For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Lonti marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle

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is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals, the love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars.

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I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. EPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out?

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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,, 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 Kinkade, there is something about them, right? There is something interesting going on here. I'm not saying that like it's good or artistically brilliant, but there's a reason different groups of people

obsessively edit and modify Kinkade art. There's a couple of different subcultures based around that. You can find a lot of his work with eldritch horrors and elder gods added in, as in, so he's gonna show you this Thomas Kinkade lighthouse paired with Cthulhu. Oh my God, that's gorgeous.

It works pretty well. Yeah, it's a much better painting when you throw Cthulhu in Oh my God, that's gorgeous. It works pretty well. Yeah, it's a much better painting when you throw Cthulhu in there. Not mad at it. I mean, what is it? Yeah, and while Thomas Kincade stuff, they do a Star Wars imprint. There's been a fan thing where people will take

his borderline surreal landscapes and cabin paintings and turn them into the sights of colorful Star Wars battles. As you can see here in this painting of a Thomas Kincade cottage with a pair of AT-ATs. Not bad, not bad. I've seen that one before, yeah. Surprisingly, they kind of fit in. Like it doesn't look jarring, right?

The worst part is that looks better than all the official Thomas Kincade Star Wars prints they're selling now. 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. 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 gonna tell you the real story, which is much more interesting and involves Ralph Bakshi. So- Oh, God damn it. Yeah, you're God damn right. But first I'm gonna tell the version of the story

that Thomas Kinkade, once he becomes a business empire, wants everyone to believe. Now I really want one of his pains efforts, 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 he 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. It 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. You did the first two animated 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 I, you know, a lot of people, including me, have always found like very intriguing. Bakshi saw talent in Thomas. He's a very weird guy. He's a very weird guy, but- It's basically his career started in Terry tunes, like heckle and jekyll and all that shit 1960s spider-man cartoon. No shit from that to do it. Yeah

Spider-man pointing each other meme that's I believe that's a box. Okay. Okay interesting Then he started doing all his adult cartoons in the 70s. Yeah, really 80s Yeah, and then we cut, you will never see again, 1989's Mighty Mouse cartoon. Oh yeah. With the cocaine reference. Yeah. I mean, Bakshi's blood was about 60% cocaine

through the entirety of the 1980s. John Chris Belushi was working on that one. That's another bastard for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll be our probably maybe our next episode, the Ridden Stimpy Guy. 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 just brought up. Thomas Kincaid does a lot of the background art in Fire and Ice. A lot of the environment is drawn by Kincaid does a lot of the background art in Fire and Ice. A lot of the environment 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? It's Bruce Vallejo who did like a lot of the most iconic Conan art. Sorry, Frank Frazetta, not Bruce Vallejo.

Was it Frank Frazetta? Yeah, it's Frank Frazetta who did a lot of Conan art. That's my bad. 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? 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, you know, part of their start from Fire and Ice. So Bakshi and Frazetta 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, 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 I've got a couple of clips in here for you.

In a way that is kind of like, you see a lot of Fogg and 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 connection. The backgrounds are stunning. I remember that from the movie. He's very good. It really is a beautiful film.

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 Dinotopia series. That's who Gurney is.

Yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's James Gurney, right? I was a big fan of that as a kid, right? The layout artist for Fire and Ice was Peter Chung, who later created Aeon Flux. Yeah, okay. Yeah, Roy Thomas, one of the writers, created the character Vision for Marvel,

as well as Ghost Rider 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 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. 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. Yeah. 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, Dynatopia 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. That's kind of hurt a little bit too. I know. Like. Yeah, poor George W. Bush. The most, the greatest suffering artist today. Yes, 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 a full war hall 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 a route 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? He probably- Of all the paintings I have sold, I've sold more prints than I've ever sold those 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 critics don't like it. They think that it looks either 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 mentioned landscape, it just immediately goes to hate. 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 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 Kinkade himself would always insist that like,

because 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 Kinkade 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, develops this attitude that while 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 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 them. 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 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. 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 and 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 emotion 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's 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 New Post. So the love them had to be about modern 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. 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, he's kind of, 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 it's kind of interesting to me that from all of this, he comes to a series of understandings and he kind of becomes, he comes to a series of understandings and 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 Kinkade 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, is thanking, no one thank is for service. Uh, yeah, there's a crying soldier saluting with his back turned to an American family. There's a baby crying in a car. It's like a little deranged. A baby is like, there's not a steering wheel,

it's just a baby head. It's, it's, it's a very. It's a deranged piece of art. And you know, Kinkade stuff was always a lot simpler than this, but it's the, you know, 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- Oh no.

Yeah. I scrolled, oh no. Yeah, I'm building to like, Kinkade stuff and all of this weird AI boomerang, it's all stuff that's vaguely patriotic. It's usually paired with text. AI Jesus. Yeah. AI Jesus.

Does it have cat ears? Yeah, 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 Kcaid's stuff too. 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.

Where the baby- They're all the ones with the baby, so. 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. Oh. Jesus has a Lenovo smartphone from 2016. Yes.

I desperately want to Photoshop a nail into that Jesus's wrist. I don't know why. It's just driving me nuts to have it there. Yeah, where's the stick mod, fucking AI? The kiss is unsettling. It's all unsettling. Yeah. It all shares unsettling. Yeah. 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 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 Kinkade and the way he used light and color and the kinds of things he picked 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 sees how much potential there is in this, right? All of that stuff together is Thomas Kincaid, and 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 Kincaid's work, I started thinking about all of this AI shit

that every time I hop onto Facebook to get in, 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 Kincaid-y, 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 US 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 Kinkade 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 is 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 you touched on the whole,

how many of us have like older relatives who 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, I asked my parents about that. They're like, no, we always locked our doors. My dad lived out in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas.

It's like, we still locked our doors. We didn't trust people. Because people stole. Yeah, fucking in cold blood came out when, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, fucking in cold blood came out when, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, it harkens to that whole, the rose-tinted glass view.

Yes. That I'm beginning to see a lot of Gen Xers start also throwing out there, like, oh, back when we drank out of the water hose and our parents let's play the sunset. I'm like, yeah, that wasn't great. Yeah, you were just a child, but it wasn't like a better time.

But that feeling that we didn't used to have to lock our doors, like Kinkade in 1990 bottles that feeling, right? And finds a way to sell it back to people at scale, right? And that is the source of his wealth. Speaking of selling things, Robert. Yeah, speaking of the source of our wealth, here's some advertisers. For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly

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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. And I wanna 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 had felt had rescued art from insularity and infused it with iconography that meant something to ordinary people. What Warhol did with soup cans in Marilyn Monroe

can Cade thought he could do with Eden-inspired garden scenes in 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 with. Yeah. I can say Lichtenstein 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. I just don't see. Oh yeah, he did. Oh, Andy Warhol. The evil gals, thanks. Good Oh, Andy will. To the evil gals, please. Good job, Andy.

Great guy. So by 1989, Thomas Kinkade 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 wanna 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 $0.

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 this has- That's very American though. You gotta admit, that's just like- Oh yeah.

Yeah. I started a con and it worked. It's the origin of almost every great fortune. Oh God, he wouldn't vote 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 speaking. Again, I remember that picture of him with a fucking mullet. I mean, what a lure.

Yeah, I would- How do you 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 do- Okay, so-

Yeah. I grew up in Southern Baptist. I remember going to a bunch of revivals like at football stadiums, okay? Lot of moments. I do think it's always that slick suit and the slicked back hair and folks, little folksy 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 you can be, I think what he does is he's the guy who looks a little bit on the edge. Like he might've 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 in the,

it's that Alex Jones things, like I've been in the depths of Hollywood. I know the real evils, you know, cause he was in a couple of Linklater movies. I think that's probably part of it. All the times we've had like revivals, it was like Elvis's step brother or half brother who showed up as a speaker 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. So he and Rash named their company Lighthouse Publishing and they state their goal, like the company mission is to engulf as many hearts as possible with art, which in a very concave fashion is vaguely similar

or sinister. 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, 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 gonna get rich.

But the value of art is in its exclusivity. And Thomas realized that when you're dealing with people 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 Orline 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 the way a real painting would.

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 rooms, right? And that's the key to the Thomas Kinkade 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 that the elites like. It's a painting that you love that makes you feel safe

and you can pass it on to your children and it'll be worth so much money. It's gotta 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, he's selling these through, they launch a series of galleries, right? Which are art retail establishments, right? They only, as initially they only sell Thomas's work.

art retail establishments, right? They only, initially they only sell Thomas's work and they are operated individually kind of like a McDonald's franchise. So like independent people franchise, concave 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, he'll 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 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 of Lichtenstein

who has people who created 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, uh, 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 to highlight kind of the degree to which these people are being scammed into thinking they're buying an investment. 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 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. 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'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 too, a lot of stuff like this. Well also the 90s were the collection, like that's when the comic market becomes everything. Baseball cards are really big in the early 90s. And 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. Ken Kate 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 Kinkade'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, 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, 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. Yes, yes. Thomas himself is dropped from the case. The company he starts is found to have misrepresented

the business opportunity that Ken Cain, selling Ken C K prints represented. But- He would have been in one of Trump's cabinets. Oh my God. 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 gonna make you? What am I gonna make you? Sec def. You're in charge of the army, Randy. Oh, fuck yeah. Yeah, you gotta pick- Shit's 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 like a smaller than Afghanistan, but bigger than Grenada, you know? Really find us one of those sweet spots and let's just, let's start sending in Marines. You know?

Greenland's had too fucking good for too fucking long. I think we could take Greenland. Yeah, I think we could take Greenland, you know? Lot of minerals. Yeah. They probably have a president who's using the Wiccan Carter 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. Ha ha ha ha. 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 mousetrappedcomic.blog. I also have mousetrappedcomic.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 wanna 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. So, here you go.

Well, any episode about Hitler is about a painter. It is, it is. You know what we We're going to launch our pure art criticism episode of Hitler I mean honestly Hitler and John Wayne Gacy's and how would match up? I think they would have been friends actually 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.

There's a good buddy company in there. There's an old history novel there. Yeah, yeah. About that friendship. Hitler and John Wayne Gacy. Either 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. Let's send the podcast I'm working for you. Okay. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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