A few postings ago, I was sort of kidding when I talked about Thomas Kinkade having an art show outside his kitschy mall stores and in a real art gallery or museum.

I'll be goddamned if "the painter of light" proved my joke posting right... read it and weep.

Kinkade's paintings are to be on exhibition at the Grand Central Art Center, California State University at Fullerton (CSUF) and that city's main art gallery.

Grand Central - CSUF's funky facility in Santa Ana's Artists Village - has "steadily built a reputation for hosting cutting-edge exhibits of outsider, noncommercial art. And the Main Art Gallery has showcased student and faculty work for years." And Richard Chang from The Orange County Register further writes:

"Mike McGee, CSUF gallery director and professor.... explained that the Kinkade show is being curated by Jeffrey Vallance, an internationally respected curator (and "cultural provocateur," McGee said) known for placing popular phenomena in a contemporary art context....

Vallance's plan is to create a life-size Kinkade chapel and fill it with the artist's Christian art. He also aims to build a Kinkade living room, dining room, bedroom and Bridge of Faith. Kinkade knickknacks will abound.

"There's no financial motivation for us to do this," McGee said. "It's for the sake of stirring things up, creating dialogue."

The scary part is that.... it will probably work, and whoever painted all those big-eyed kid paintings for Sears when I was a kid, or the dogs playing pool, or Elvis-on-velvet, better start contacting Vallance, as I think this may be the next big trend in art.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight....

C'mon Blake.... go to California and review this show for us... please!!!

Thanks to ArtsJournal.com...

Since the economy is booming, the art market is apparently very hot. The secondary art market that is!

A while back I had a rant about wealthy DC area people and their art collecting habits.... from my viewpoint (and generalizing).

Another case in point. Our recent Three Cuban Female Photographers show was a spectacular success. It received a couple of nice reviews in the press; it was one of our most visited shows ever, and it sold well.

All but one of the sales was to someone not from around here... New York, Great Britain, etc. Sales to private collectors and museums alike.

With the exception of one very sharp collector, and although the show was very heavily-attended by locals, only one photo was sold locally.

The price ranges were $600 to $1500, which for contemporary photography, by photographers in museum collections worldwide, is more than a fair price.

Blake Gopnik, writing all the way from London, delivers a superb review and an art lesson history with his review of the Donald Judd retrospective at the Tate.

Why isn't this show coming to America?

This paragraph from the review is how I've always seen Judd's work:

"Describe the [Judd] piece and it sounds terribly, even ridiculously simple. It can even sound like some conceptual-art trick meant to test precisely how little it takes to make an object count as art -- Judd's sculpture sometimes gets billed as working like Marcel Duchamp's urinal, only using objects even less inviting to the eye. But experience the work in person, and things get much more complex than that. "

An yet, by the time Gopnik finishes the review, he's actually convinced me that I've been looking at Judd's work completely wrong all these years!

I won't blow the ending... read the review here.

And in order to see how art criticism can differ, you should also the Adrian Searle review in The Guardian.

The retrospective was curated by Tate director Nicholas Serota, a Judd fan since 1970. Read his viewpoint from a fan's point of view, here.

On the flight back from San Diego I read Mi Moto Fidel, by Brit ex-pat Christopher P. Baker and published by the National Geographic. I found it boorish, vulgar and somewhat racist.

Let's not mince words. After reading this book my immediate reaction was one of distaste. Not just because of the constant sexual encounters with very young Cuban women that make up a large part of the book, or the extraordinary stereotyping of Cubans present throoughout the entire book, or the spectacular lack of knowledge of Cuban history shown by the writer (this book is supposed to be, I think, a travel guide of sorts).

It was mainly because I kept thinking that a lot of the dialogue between the author and the locals, seemed... well... made up and just not believable.

Baker starts as a Castro apologist with an interesting twist to his apologies. He recognizes somewhat the brutal yoke that the Cuban Revolution has become upon its people - but hey! it's OK, because Cubans are a fun, sexual, libertine people!

Towards the end of the book he has somewhat of an epiphany where he realizes that Castro has been "using" the embargo, helping to maintain it and making sure it sticks and stays on - as an excuse to always have an ever present excuse for the miseries of Cuban life and thus further abuse the Cuban people he has imperiously brutalized for over 40 years.

And when the 40something Baker tells a 14-year-old-Cuban girl that he finds sexually attractive: "I'll be back in two years" .... well, I think he means it. Perhaps his next "travel book" should be on Thailand.