JoeCarter is especially snide, not only dismissing Kincaid's art for it's sentimentality but saying:
What the artist fails to understand is that Vietnamese-Americans (as well as African-, Mexican-, Chinese-, and other hyphenated Americans) probably do not share the Anglo-American cottage fantasy. And his cottage scenes are precisely that: fantasies.
He's only partly right. Compare and contrast:
Thomas Kincaid:
Amorosolo's famous Philippine paintings:
No, personally I can't stand Kincaid (his paintings use cool colors and are cluttered).
Carter writes:
his cottage scenes are precisely that: fantasies. Adults hang paintings of Kinkade’s paintings of cottages in their living room for the same reason that little girls put posters of unicorns and rainbows on their bedroom walls. It is a pseudo-referential nostalgia, a longing for what does not exist in reality but exists in the fantasy realm of possibility.
Ah, true. But why do you feel that a painting, no matter how "sentimental" and idealistic, is wrong?
which brings us to Tolkien:
Tolkien maintains (that) critics of Fantasy are confusing “the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter” .
Critics would imply, without explanation or justification, that any escape from the world around us is necessarily shameful, and Tolkien resists that thinking strenuously, even going so far as to compare that line of thinking to .. totalitarian state(s) that considers departure from or even criticism of it treachery.
full essay by the Tolkien professor HERE.
and a longer vesion of this essay at BNN.
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