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Aesthetics Awry: The Painter of Light™ and the Commodification of Artistic Values

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10253860600633366

1477-223X

Jonathan E. Schroeder,

Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification

Thomas Kinkade is America's most commercially successful and wealthy artist, with an annual turnover in excess of $100 million. Many artists and art dealers are business focused; Kinkade may have just taken this commercial concern to its logical extreme by extending his lifestyle brand into galleries, real estate, and equities. Like brands, art circulates within commodity culture, largely outside the artist's control once it leaves the studio. Yet management theory often clings to an appreciative, aesthetically elevated conception of aesthetics and art, combined with an essentialized, glamorized notion of The Artist, ignoring art's historical role in selling pictures, celebrating power, and serving patrons. In this paper, I present a case study of aesthetics gone awry, as a warning about applying excessive aesthetics—or at least a romantic, historically uncontextualized vision of aesthetics—to management and marketing research, and to provide an important reminder of the intellectual risks of aestheticizing management: critical perspective often slips away, and aesthetics is once again elevated to a higher spiritual plane than commerce.