The broken ethics of the evangelical economy
Via Ezra comes this interesting angle on a lawsuit against "artist" Thomas Kinkade that may have larger implications for the subculture I like to call the evangelical economy. There's a lot of complications in the Kinkade empire, but the lawsuit in question is over the predatory relationship Kinkade had with his dealers, who signed onto the unfair deal on the incorrect assumption that Kinkade's art was going to keep rising in value. Classic bubble speculation issues---when something has a meteoric rise in value, one should assume that it's peaking, not that it's going to continue exploding in value. There are, after all, only so many Christians with horrible taste that want art to reflect their so-called values instead of their taste to buy paintings, but for some reason, when the bubble mentality kicks in, people forget that there is such a thing as market saturation.