Inept kitsch doesn’t last and doesn’t enter history books! (If I’m wrong, show me an art history book which admiringly cites kitsch from 100 and 200 years ago.) Kinkade’s kitsch has been successful only because of marketing. (Still, it bankrupted many Kinkade franchised gallery owners.) There are many American artists that even the buyers of Kinkade prints (yes, they are all prints, with dabbles of paint made by slave workers in his San Jose factory) could appreciate, yet they starve, because all art, music, literature in this country have been industrialized and sold by marketing organizations, like toothpaste and cereal. Trash is trash and our duty to ourselves is to learn the difference between , say, Kenny G, and James Galloway.
So the terms art and artist, are reserved for whomever the self appointed gatekeepers of the “fine” arts say they are... highfalutin bull-schtick!