Oh, those prices are reasonable for Giclee prints, especially signed ones.
Heh, giclee prints... <giglesnort>
How do you sell a glorified inkjet printer system to snobbish artists and the pretentious fine art crowd? You slap a $10,000 price tag on the printer and give the prints posh French name, of course. "Giclée" translates more or less as "nozzle" or "squirt", so it was a natural choice. Thus was born the "fine art Giclée print". Mash the print button on your PC as often as you want sell the printouts for $500 a pop. Easy money.
Sadly, nobody told them that the term "giclee" is actually a slang term used within the French porn industry. There it means... umm... the end of the scene... so to speak.
How do you sell a glorified inkjet printer system to snobbish artists and the pretentious fine art crowd? You slap a $10,000 price tag on the printer and give the prints posh French name, of course.
Why does the name Thomas Kinkade "Painter of Crap" suddenly pop into my head?
Yup, everything in his stores are prints. Imagine prints with dabs of paint added here and there for texture by God knows who complete with exorbinant price tags. The wife's family went last year to the Kinkade store in the mall to buy one for my MIL/FIL for Christmas, I'd never seen his crap, uh, I mean work, before. In about 30 seconds I was totally turned off. I did everything I could to talk said family out of the purchase but to no avail, now everytime I go over there I have to see that Godawful $450 "painting" sitting on the wall. (and that was one of the CHEAPER ones!)
I love my wife and her family but sometimes they can take tacky to a whole new level...
here's something interesting...
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1739383,00.html
And a quote I found:
And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.
"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.
That's one wild and crazy guy...
The Kinkade store at the mall here went out of business. It was a victory for art.
Gawd, don't let my mother know, she loves his stuff.
Personally, I won't bother trying to say that it isn't art, but depictions of village scenes just isn't my thing.
Now, a nice castle with a dragon in it...
Great, now I'm thinking about my idea to commission a piece of art again...
I want a personal avatar. I'm thinking a techowizard dragon w/glasses.