Maggie's Farm

Kincaid seems to merge Art Nouveau and the Pre-Raphaelites --his value control is comic-strip --receding objects just get less color and more white, with no suggestion at all of the atmospheric effects which cause distant objects to shoot less of their color into the eye. Many painters have trouble with this --they 'd rather not accept how little information actually is seen and how very much is conjectured, or conjured. Thus the tree in the distance is painted as though it's a smaller and slightly washed-out companion of the near tree. Kincaid could've taken another look at the landscape in the distance behind Mona Lisa. And yes i realize how insufferably fatuous all that sounds --is --i am. Who am i to crit a famous money-making painter, and all that. But that's just the point --if you are going to be famous and well-paid, dammit, do it right --or else you expose the entire enterprise of making a market in aesthetic value as so rigorlessly subjective that art fame is simply bestowed on just whoever happens to be standing where Lady Luck drops her hankie.

--and that's probably a healthy thing for a culture's twenty-somethings to do for awhile --if the rebels can retrieve the tossed-out baby --which is 'the future', which in time will prove priceless --someday after the toss out, after the gold rush, after the fall, after the commune folds, after the people get tired of the shaman (the shame-man) telling them how hard he works to help them.