Word: todays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...carnage but from an economic collapse that whacked the country. The films of the early '30s are full of clues to America's mood in the first long ache of the Great Depression: frantic, feisty, obsessed with getting a job, a buck and ahead by any means necessary. Today's typical film is a fairy tale; the '30s pictures played like tabloid journalism--the March of Crime. Gangsters, gold diggers, ruthless businessmen, wage slaves and the not-working class all jumped out of the headlines and onto the screen...
...industry today has no conscience. Nor does the current cinema possess half the wit, elan and social acuity of Hollywood in the dirty '30s. Those films were more than the sum of their smirks. They were expressions of an industry scrambling for survival, like their amoral heroes for sale, and doing it in a style--raffish, dynamic, truly adult--that we've hardly seen since...
...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...
Technology has entered the picture. In the past, the quality of print reproductions was so poor that it preserved, by default, both the economic and the artistic value of the original work. Today artists such as Kinkade operate high-tech facilities that bond lithographs to an acrylic that can be rolled or even sprayed onto canvas with the details so fine that even the brush strokes are replicated. Kinkade's studio employs a team of 30 touch-up artists whose sole task is to hand-paint highlights onto the prints, enabling the sales team to market each...
...Hanks, another top-selling artist, is that too few art schools teach their students how to earn a living at their craft. "I used to think if the art was good it would sell itself," Hanks says. "Then I worked and starved for 15 years, and I realized that today's art business is about selling your name." Wyland started marketing his work in junior high school and never let up. "The art snobs frown on any marketing or business," he says, "but the old masters weren't successful until they were dead. I didn't want to wait that...