It has always been so and always will be so.

To point this out is elitist, but it is also true.

It seems to me that the saner path is to own up to elitism, but acknowledge that it isn’t always such a bad thing.

Then, admitting that it’s okay to have elites, maybe we can have more realistic expectations for the majority. We can call schlock schlock, but we don’t need to get caught up in absurd crusades to make everyone above average or try quite so hard to broadcast our elite credentials by trashing the tastes of the majority.

I don’t know … that’s my reaction to this. Peters writes well enough and his criticisms are all valid, but megachurch attendees and Thomas Kinkade fans just seem like such easy targets that there’s something ungentlemanly about setting them up as one-dimensional caricatures and taking them down with such vigor.

I do, however, agree with much of the rest of D.W.’s post, especially the part about beauty being lost in the avalanche of the common and the average. I believe that this supports my point; as I said above, beauty is hard to come by. And if the average person mistakes Kinkade for beautiful “art,” or Transsiberian Orchestra for “classical music,” or whatever, I’m not prepared to fault them for choosing those expressions over other less wholesome, ugly ones.

I’ll take Bruckner or Sibelius over Andrew Lloyd Webber anyday. But I’ll say nothing bad about the man or woman who chooses Lloyd Webber over Korn or Green Day or the latest (c)rap travesty.

It is not that it does not occur in this remarkable country, it is simply that it is generally lost in the avalanche of a more crass and pedestrian output. The few times it breaks out into popular culture, such as with American Jazz, we amply demonstrate the fecundity of this country when we revere fearless and joyful levels of skill.

Beauty is not hard to come by in this country at all. It remains all around us and simply requires diligence and a steady mind to seek it, rather than surrendering to the narcotic of the wretched output of our vicarious agora and its Elitism of Dumbass.

Elitism……wagh! …. what a simplistic slur, throw me in the briar patch some more.

Please. While I’d certainly prefer that it was Monet, Vermeer, Constable, or Hudson River School prints that hung on the walls of your average middle-class living room, Kinkade is certainly a more reasonable choice than Warhol, Rothko, or any one of the huge number of untalented hacks producing modern “art” these days.

While sentimentality may, from one angle, be a corruption of the good, from another side it can be a plea for or a grasping at beauty in a culture where beauty is often hard to come by. I grew up in a solidly middle-class family in a solidly-middle class suburb. My parents were neither common nor “classy,” but quite conventional, and their tastes ran in that direction. I cannot fault them for listening to Percy Faith and 101 Strings rather than Bach and Tchaikovsky — they had little or no exposure to music of the latter sort. But I’d argue that the former were far better choices than Iron Butterfly or The Doors, or even (dare I say it?) Elvis or The Beatles.

I have no problem criticizing sentimental bourgeois art. However, it seems to me that while doing so one should be cognizant of the perspective of the consumer of such art, and also what alternatives he has. To do otherwise seems to me to be rather snobbish and elitist.

The day has fallen.

But there shall be a new day, and another, and another.

And the days shall be called Christmas until the people tire.

And say his name.

Willson, so glad to hear your daughters are adept at the second story dangle. One of the things we took no small scientific interest in was the cranium weight to lanky frame aspect of our brother Rastus who could verily be lowered by his hands a full body length from the roof of the carport only to pitch fully around and land on his head in the remaining 6′. As I was a tad avoirdupois , I would plummet like a sphere, rotating around the center as though a planetary body before hitting and bouncing twice, sometimes three times as the other two scoundrels would throw the basketball at me. But, on the defensive line, I would kill em and inasmuch as I was the youngest boy, the oldest was always quite happy to stomp poor Rastus on a whim for me. Hence his resort to Psyops.

Thomas, , if you think I aint quite easy to read, well, you should spend a day with my beloved wife, the Concept and attempt to just try and understand the actual atavistic person she exhibited such poor judgement in betrothing herself too. My “aggressive misapprehensions ” are one of the principle objects of gleeful satire at home, particularly whensk the chillun is there. I have performed the grave task of inuring the urchins to the insanity they shall confront when abroad in this mad yet frequently funny world.

I made a mistake of hastiness in tying the mercenary Kinkade up with Rockwell. Rockwell was a true artist…of the type now called “illustrator” and his canvases are classics at recording our mid century mythology and zeitgeist. He was also a great story teller and a phenomenal draftsman. A few hours at his museum in Stockbridge , Mass. are worth every minute. He and his pals also used to dress up as injuns on ocassion and terrorize the neighbors…..a few photos of this comic behavior can be enjoyed in the Town Hall and I believe the museum as well. My distinct apologies for placing him in a group with Kinkade, the DNA imprinting “Painter of Light”…or is that sacharine “blight”?

God bless you for your wonderfully sane comment. If you are interested in a perspective that could not be further from Mr. Peters’, I humbly suggest you might enjoy mine: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2009/12/17/a-war-worth-winning/

I agree about Norman Rockwell. He is an honest craftsman, a good man and a very good illustrator. It is hardly necessary to say he is not a great artist: How many people are? (I recall walking with a naturalist of sorts and looking at the birds she said something about how pigeons are not very good fliers. It seemed somehow mean: I could only think, “Well, they fly a lot better than we do.”)

I don’t think the junk from the Saatchi show, pickled sharks, etc. are all that important. Even the people who pompously defend it don’t like it. That it’s outrageous is the point. Keeping people from liking it is they define and confine it to an elite, their place from which to piss. Kinkade is worse because he corrupts the good.