Thomas Kinkade Quotes

I think commercial success is really important. It means there are more people listening, and you're affecting the zeitgeist more. If only a hundred people know you exist, it's harder to get your message across.

It's just amazing to do something that's part of a pop culture phenomenon.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

Whatever is popular deserves attention.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

Contemporary art will never achieve the audience of football, pop music, or television, so I think we should stop comparing its possible area of influence to that of big mass-media events.

Some people think big audiences are crass and that, say, a comedy that appeals to a wide audience is pandering. Other people would argue that you could say that about Moliere.

On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture.

All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

I'm still heard on 1,500 radio stations across North America every day, about 220 million people a day in 150 countries.

I'm not a snob... there's room for entertainment that reaches a lot of people and can be really good, but you don't just have to be one kind of actor.

It would be awesome to stay popular, but if I was only an underground artist, I would be okay with that.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

I am broadcaster's biggest cheerleader because I genuinely believe in it. Where else can you get 20 million people a week watching 'NCIS' or 'American Idol?' Where else can you get 120 million watching the Super Bowl?

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

You can make a feature that makes millions but only so many people see it. With a hit TV show, every week you'll have 16 million - 20 million people watching you.

If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

I think the general public's response to my projects is very strong. You can be an intellectual and say that popularity detracts from architectural quality. On the other hand, you can see in the public's identification something very positive.

Today it's not culture; it's box office.

If the only people we seek to impress are within our own ivory towers of artistic excellence or our hallowed institutions, we will find the audience is gone in 20 to 30 years. I find as I keep a broader audience in mind, I choose to sing and say more things I actually want to share and fewer things just for the sake of impressing others.

I think that 'Twilight' is so big that nothing can affect it.

I think it's always important for academics to study popular culture, even if the thing they are studying is idiotic. If it's successful or made a dent in culture, then it is worthy of study to find out why.

You never know when what you do in the arts means something to people, and you never really know if you've been received well.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.