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Utah Museum To Host Symposium On Art, Kitsch And Culture

ArtMuseum.USU.edu
Artwork by Frank McEntire

A museum in Northern Utah is hosting a symposium for its current exhibition on ‘kitsch’, which is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts”.  

Logan’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art is hosting a symposium for its exhibition A Matter of Taste: Art, Kitsch, and Culture.  The symposium will include regional, national and international artists and scholars, as well as kitschy events like an Elvis impersonator and a live karaoke band.

One of the creative individuals who will be visiting Utah is infiltration artist Jeffrey Vallance, who had a unique relationship with one of the most famous artists in the exhibition: Thomas Kinkade.

“He had this secret life that a lot of people don’t know about … He felt like he was trapped in this image of being the goody-good artist, and he was thought of as a Christian and a family man … He sort of hated that, but he was making so much money that he had to keep with that. But he had this secret life … He had a different name: Ed Aknik, which is Kinkade spelled backwards, and he would dress up like a biker and he had this big beard … I don’t think people know about this. It’s kind of the dark side of Kinkade,” Vallance said.

Link to UPR story on NEHMA exhibition and interviews with artists Frank McEntire and Jeffrey Vallance:

http://upr.org/post/utah-museum-explores-art-kitsch-and-culture