Hope (Part II)

As I waited with baited breathe for the outcome of the American election, I  thought of Thomas Kincade.  This is a painting by the man who is probably the most well-known artist in the United States today (he died in 2012).  It is entitled ‘Garden of Hope’. Here is what the artist himself says about it on his Thomas Kincade Studios website:

‘Hope is the great gift of a loving God. In ‘The Garden of Hope’, second in my Gardens of Light collection, I celebrate the bountiful blessing that is a hopeful spirit. Radiance bathes a garden in the woods, pouring down in a flood of light upon an ancient stone urn that is a vessel of hope.

The deeply mysterious relationship between hope and sacrifice is expressed in the symbolism of the urn. Central is the Roman cross, bearing the visages of Mary and Jesus. A magnificent spray of flowers bursts forth from the urn. Surely, ‘The Garden of Hope’ is a garden lavish with new beginnings.’[1]

 Why am I thinking about a mediocre American artist when the fate of not just the United States but the whole world hangs in the balance? Because his paintings open a window onto the subjectivity (or lack of it) of the millions who voted Republican. 

I don’t think it’s enough to focus on the anger and resentment factors when seeking to understand how so many people can behave in what to me – and to you -  seem incomprehensibly stupid ways.  No. We need to look to other dimensions of the human psyche,  especially, I think, to the nature of the hope these people nurture.  Trump and the Republicans mirror these hopes just as much as they give substance to their supporters’ fear, anger, and resentment. As I said in the last post, hope is two-edged. It can be a real catalyst for action and change, but it can also delude and foster false beliefs and aspirations, impossible or irrational goals. But one way or another, we all harbor hopes for the future.  Looking at a Kincade painting is like looking at the soul of a Republican. And what we see is the visual image of their hopefulness.

In the 1990s  the dissident Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid set out to learn what  a real "people's" art  looked like. In other words, informed by their experience of the Socialist Realist propaganda art of the Soviet Union, they were interested to know what people everywhere really wanted to see in a picture. They began with the United States, their adopted country, and conducted a survey through a professional marketing firm in order to paint America's ‘Most Wanted’ and also America’s ‘Least Wanted’ paintings. They didn’t ask a question like: ‘What does a hopeful picture look like?’ Instead, their questions were more straightforwardly visual, such as ‘What’s your favorite colour?’,  ‘Do you prefer paintings with sharp angles or soft curves?’, and  content-based, like, ‘Would you rather look at a painting with figures that are nude or fully clothed? Should the people in the painting be at leisure or working? Should they be indoors or outside, and if the latter, in what kind of landscape? This painting is the one they painted as a result of the questionnaire – America’s ‘Most Wanted’:

Yes. That’s George Washington in the middle foreground (I suppose we can up-date it to an image of Trump).  In the end, Komar and Melamid polled 14 countries, and discovered, for example, that Russia’s most-wanted painting was remarkably similar to the United States’ - minus Washington, but still with children playing  beside a lake, and a predominantly blue colouration. In fact, they discovered that in every country they polled— from China and Kenya to Iceland and Ukraine, but with the curious exception of Holland— people seemed to want more or less the same picture.And what was the  various people’s “Least Wanted’ picture? You have probably already guessed. Modern art. Especially, abstract art of the monochromatic, geometric and textured variety. 

Komar and Melamid’s project shows that a secure, that is to say, socially uncontroversial,  message of hope is what most people want to have communicated through pictures. But this is simply because that image expresses the kind of hope they nurture within themselves. In this sense, art’s has a practical function , which is essentially therapeutic, preventative and prophylactic.  But we would be wrong to blame ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture for this phenomenon.  A look at  art history confirms that this kind of picture has always been what is ‘most wanted’.  Most images have been made to communicate unproblematically optimistic or hopeful states of mind or messages based on the presentation of familiarly affirmative content  and the use of an aesthetically pleasing style   that serve  to consolidate people’s need for a positive outcome,  personal and collective. So, it should come as no surprise that Komar and Melamid’s painting looks remarkably similar to Thomas Kincade’s oeuvre.

So the Russian artists’ project tells us a good deal about the troubled and troubling relationship  not only between hope and art, but also between hope that is truly empowering and hope that is emasculating. It certainly helps to explain why so many people find modern art to be very far from being  images of hope, even when the artists themselves and their apologists expressly declared that it was. But it also goes a long way towards explaining Trumpism and the way the Republican Party has evolved.

America’s ‘Most Wanted’ painting and Kincade’s ‘Garden of Hope’ are both facile and banal images of hope. They serve the purpose of saving people the trouble of truly imagining hope for themselves. The  genuine expression of feeling, the communication of complex values and ideas, is evidently not what the majority of people want from looking at pictures. They prefer images that reduce experience to amenable clichés, to the conventional and manageable.  Once an image is so familiar and lacking in originality it is indeed  ‘evil’, in a sense, because it acts as an obstacle to the communication of authentic thoughts and feelings.  

In the 1940s, George Orwell referred to what he termed a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’. These are verbal images ‘which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ When an image is so totally familiar, it is possible to be almost unconscious when employing them, and as a result, we will be lulled into a ‘reduced state of consciousness’ which, wrote Orwell,  ‘if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.’ 

 Kincade is pandering to a very large audience, and as Komar and Melamid affirmed, he is only giving people what they want. This is what an image of ‘hope’ looks like to millions of people, and  it is, therefore, what ‘hope’ is for them.  If we are going to take the political ramifications of hope seriously it is definitely necessary to acknowledge the trivializing sentimentality so often associated with its ostensible expression within images, most especially in popular culture. 

[1]  https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/limited-edition-art/gardens/garden-of-hope-the-limited-edition-art/