Of course it is art!!!! Don't be silly!!!! The person who designs a logo for a can of green beans is doing art!!!! A person who creates a kitty cat for a greeting card is doing art. A person who designs the pattern for Hallmark wrapping paper is doing art. The person who designs a flower pattern to be embroidered on bath towels for Canon is doing art! Kinkciade is a decorative artist. If you like his work fine, if not that is okay too. But at least understand that "art" covers a very wide gamut of creative endeavors from important to trivial.
Note, that is a quote from a poster attacking Kinkade--I was responding to his quote.
I agree that Kinkade is a fine artist and clearly many people like his work.
No, the person who designs a logo for a can of green beans, or a pattern for wrapping paper, or a flower pattern for embroidery, is a designer. He will certainly have had art training but he is a designer. The person who actually draws the kitty for Hallmark is an illustrator. Here's the distinction: the artist has a unique view of the world and shows us something we haven't seen before. He is original.
The great artists have always been "painters of light" in that they showed light in unique and beautiful ways; look at Vermeer, using the minimal gray light of the Low Countries to make a subtle illumination of human character. Such artists open our understanding of the world and make us see things differently. The impressionists let us see sunlight differently than we'd seen it before. Flesh, human interactions and emotions, history, landscapes, the way light touches mundane objects, even animals are visualized in a new way when a real artist touches them. And each work in the artist's career advances the perspective and builds on its predecessors. It can be beautiful or address homely subjects but it is unique.
Kinkade, on the other hand, is primarily a businessman who has discovered a market niche. Nothing wrong with that, unless he exploits art gallery owners, which may or may not have taken place. He is an illustrator, not technically a very good one, who does the same thing over and over and over again.
The bottom line is, just because something appears on a canvas, it's not therefore art. It might be better termed illustration. That's not an unimportant distinction or a mere exercise in semantics.