It probably is getting tiresome, me drawing parallels with the music biz, but the commercial aspect of the art world has some similarities. We all know that some pop music acts are simply marketing driven. Some producer decides another girl-band (for example) can sell. So he brings a group of good looking, semi (at least) talented singer/dancers together, decides on a marketing strategy (sex seems always to be a good gamble) and either composes a song himself (if he can) or finds some studio musician to put together something that has a decent 'hook'. And there you go -- the next big seller may have hit the scene. On the other hand there are some pop music artists (and I have no qualms about using this term) who truly make wonderful music, and do so for many years. Examples: Becker and Fagan (Steely Dan), Peter Gabriel (Genesis, etc), Sting (The Police, etc), Paul McCartney (The Beatles, etc), and so on. Commercial? Well, yeah to a certain extent. A marketing ploy? Maybe at first. But they all produce well executed, thoughtful, and I will say beautiful pieces of music that the broad public can appreciate. And, most importantly for this discussion, they are extremely successful at it. This parallels what we're talking about here. The commerciality of an artist can be looked at on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the little puppy with the big sad eyes and 10 being purely artisticly driven -- Van Gogh perhaps?. It's a very subjective thing, and I put Kinkaid at around 3. That is not to say he isn't good at it, he's obviously technically very good. But his work is not going to challenge anyone or make a bold statement about anything. He is singularly trying to sell stuff. And I don't have a problem with that. The point of this post is to try to put this issue into perspective. I think we can learn something from him, even if we don't particularly want to emulate his fixation on making a big business out of it. To get into the public eye many of the pop artists got their start at least partially by clever marketing. The image of Hendrix picking with his teeth and burning is guitar on stage at Monterey comes to mind. A publicity stunt for sure, but that's what people talked about when they went home. Very clever I'd say. What we need is a fractal artist who can pick with his teeth. ;) And I nominate Keith. Start practicing man!