Review: Art for Everybody

“I have about twenty of his paintings,” a woman says in the trailer promoting Art for Everybody, the new documentary about Thomas Kinkade. When this voiceover boomed over the Belcourt’s speakers on a May Friday night, the audience there for a sold-out screening of an experimental biopic about indie rock legends Pavement couldn’t stop guffawing. Ostensibly, they were laughing at the hokey painter of quaint country landscapes and faith art who dominated the malls of the South and Midwest throughout the 1990s. But really, they were praising their superiority over this woman, which they thought they had earned through their discerning arthouse taste. 

At first, I was disgusted that the trailer vastly oversimplified director Miranda Yousef’s compelling look at Kinkade’s life and his impact on the artworld. But the audience’s reaction made me realize it was a brilliant bait and switch. Unlike the one-dimensional Netflix doc fare that passes through the festival-to-streaming pipeline in a matter of weeks, Art for Everybody has, as a result of its nuance, languished without a distributor for the nearly two years since I first saw it. It is not a takedown of the painter who fell from grace and died far too young thanks to the perils of fame. Nor is it another hit job on the evangelical Christian faithful. It’s a movie that takes direct aim at the self-proclaimed culture class to excoriate their pretensions.

Though the film chronicles every dramatic beat of Kinkade’s rise and fall, it’s much more interested in positioning  him as the populist who democratized the art world by allowing the denizens of middle class mall shoppers an entry point. Throughout, Yousef trots out a host of arts and culture experts from The New Yorker all-star Susan Orlean to art critic Christopher Knight, who pigeonhole Kinkade and his talents in their affectatious way before she offers them a glimpse of the painter’s more personal work that he had locked away in his vault for decades. 

The stuff of Kinkade’s life would have made for a compelling enough doc. Yet, Art for Everybody has its sights set on the much loftier target: those who use art primarily as a way to increase their own social capital so they can further sever their ties with the type of folks who’d offer Kinkade’s work a prominent space in their living rooms.

Art for Everybody is now playing at The Belcourt.