THE LOVE AFFAIR between the intellectuals and the trashmeisters, now more than a hundred years old, has just overtaken the man who is by some measures the most popular painter in America. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall is an essay collection that exudes a creepy fascination. While a number of the contributors manage to provide level-headed assessments of Kinkade’s place in the American imagination, I am not remotely convinced that such attention should be lavished on Kinkade’s sugar-drenched Middle America, with its frosted gingerbread domiciles, dew-kissed old-fashioned small-town Main Streets, and farmlands so fertile they look as if they’re on steroids. Alexis L. Boylan, who edited the book, would no doubt protest that the size of Kinkade’s reputation justifies the attention on sociological or cultural grounds, pure and simple. I know that many intellectuals believe we overlook middlebrow tastes at our own risk. But there is a large dose of reverse snobbery threaded through this collection. More than a generation after Pop Art became holy writ, it is rather tiresome to be announcing yet again that we live in a democracy where one person’s treasure is another person’s trailer trash, and that their masterworks are not necessarily inferior to the Picasso’s and Matisse’s in our museums. Many of the contributors to Boylan’s anthology want to devour every last bite of their middlebrow cake, but only after each tasty morsel has been skewered on a highbrow fork. The problem is not that they respect Kincade anthropologically, it is that they respect him as an artist.

Kinkade is a California boy, born in Sacramento in 1958 and educated at the University of California at Berkeley. He refers to himself as “Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light” (the term is trademarked). Through sales in Kinkade Signature Galleries in malls and by mail order, he has (or at least claims to have) turned himself into America’s most collected living artist, with work of one sort or another in one out of every twenty homes. Although reproductions of Kinkade’s Prince of Peace, a portrait of Jesus, are said to be a big seller, most of his works are landscapes and cityscapes. His subjects are isolated cottages, romantic lighthouses, snowcapped mountains, cozy small town residential neighborhoods, bustling city streets, and inviting foreign vacation spots. The paintings are overheated and underpowered, the color simultaneously shrill and soggy. Everything—houses, trees, clouds—looks as if it’s made of cotton candy.

Grappling with a man whose politics are right-wing and who is unabashedly Born Again is not necessarily easy going for the liberal-spirited or politically correct academics who have contributed to this volume. Some may pride themselves on having taken on a tough subject, but with Mormon chic ruling on Broadway I suppose Born Again chic is just around the corner. Kinkade, although a churchgoer and father of four, also has his wild-man side, which may have a sort of voyeuristic appeal for well-behaved professors. He has been accused of driving business associates into bankruptcy, and reports of his bad behavior have included “public drunkenness, strip club and bar hopping, public urination”—on a statue of Winnie the Pooh at Disneyland, no less—“lewd conduct, and at least one case of probable sexual harassment.” The man is catnip for the psychopathologists.

And since Kinkade’s images are mostly disseminated not as original oil paintings but in an endless series of editions and product spinoffs such as faux-Victorian tea cups, those who are still mulling over Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” will have more food—or junk food—for thought. I recall the critic Sidney Tillim arguing some years ago that mechanical reproductions have their own kind of aura, their particular variety of impersonality that conveys some sort of folk or pop truth. I guess such an argument can be made for Kinkade’s slick litho repros, although in order to swallow the argument one would have to feel more affection for Wal-Mart America than I can work up.

The entire subject of Thomas Kinkade is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I am not always sure whether the authors gathered together in Boylan’s collection are being grimly sincere or shamelessly ironic. I wonder if they themselves are in some doubt about this. As for the intellectual inflation that curdles so many of their arguments, it comes in forms both defensive and offensive, sometimes simultaneously. A number of contributors cannot resist the temptation to take Clement Greenberg’s old essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” for another spin. I find this absurd. What on earth does a piece of writing that was meant to explain the miracle of Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian have to tell us about the work of a man who, though undoubtedly full of himself and his achievement, is mostly out to make a buck? Monica Kjellman-Chapin, in her essay “Manufacturing ‘Masterpieces’ for the Market: Thomas Kinkade and the Rhetoric of High Art,” alludes to Malraux as well as Greenberg and Benjamin, and gets herself into quite a bind, wondering whether Kinkade is “not particularly postmodern” or “not exactly postmodern.” With Kjellman-Chapin, terms such as “high,” “elite,” “low,” and “kitsch” are robbed of any relation to artistic or social reality, as they are marshaled to turn Kinkade into a figure of artistic and social consequence. “His easy assimilation of ‘high’ art’s values and markers,” she writes, “serves simultaneously to obviate any distinction and to concretize the division between elite and ersatz, while appearing to confirm his own pictorial efforts as legitimate Art-with-a-capital-A.”