Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seven years ago, struggling artist Thomas Kinkade sat in a secluded gallery well past closing time, determinedly propounding the virtues of his luminescent garden-and-cottage scenes to a young couple. He was going to give it a few more months, Kinkade told the couple, and if he couldn't sell enough paintings to earn a living, well, he'd close up shop and move...
Today the shop is not only open, it is one of more than 200 Kinkade galleries nationwide. Media Arts Group, the artist's publicly traded company, based in San Jose, Calif., recorded $126 million in sales last year. Kinkade, who owns 24% of the shares, is worth $30 million. Canvas lithographs of his paintings routinely sell for as much as $15,000. "It's staggering," he admits. Equally staggering are the profits--$5 million last year--derived from slapping the images from Kinkade's paintings onto everything from calendars to table lamps. The merchandising machine will go into overdrive this...
Kinkade is foremost of more than 30 palette-to-paycheck artists whose status as multimillionaires flies in the face of the archetypal image of the starving artist. Among the other great successes: Terry Redlin, who sells more than $20 million worth of Americana images each year and built a $12 million museum in Watertown, S.D., to showcase his work; Bev Doolittle, a painter of Native American themes who in the past decade has sold more than $60 million worth of prints; G. Harvey, who sold 30,000 prints last year, many at $1,500 or higher; Robert Bateman, a Canadian...
...because once you talk about it, it can no longer eat you alive." Fabrice Morvan, half of Milli Vanilli (his partner Rob Pilatus died of a drug and alcohol overdose last year), says, "For the first time I could show who I was as a person and an artist. I felt a sense of respect...
...house and Elvis Presley Enterprises are putting 1,000 lots taken from the Graceland vaults up for grabs in October at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas to raise money for Presley Place, a transitional-housing development in Memphis, Tenn. Among the items: a portrait by the only artist for whom Elvis ever sat (1); a Texaco credit card (2); a 1971 jumpsuit (3); sheet music for All Shook Up (with original title I'm All Shook Up) (4); and the aptly named "Peacock Belt" (5). While you should start saving money, there's no need to diet; items...