Thomas Kinkade died just over a year ago, of a drink-n-drugs overdose, as do so many great artists and drinkers.

He is famous for pictures such as this one

It is not my place to criticise his work. At the time of his death his website claimed reproductions of his paintings hung in one of every twenty US homes. He sold a lot of reproductions by mail order and over the internet. He trademarked 'Painter of Light' (which probably never occured to William Turner) and set up galleries in shopping malls through a franchise operation that is in litigation with a number of disappointed franchisees.

I'm not going to criticise his business model either. He piled it high and sold it cheap(ish). Damien Hirst prefers to trade on the rarity of his pieces and the distasteful nature of many of his raw materials, such as skulls and dead sheep. And Hirst pretends to be an anarchising socialist, which I do not believe Kinkade ever did. Either way- Aldi or Harrods Food Hall- it's still grocery.

There is also a housing estate in California designed to look like the houses he often painted.

Kinkade had a vision that people wish to live in. Typically this vision looks back to the past- between about 1880 and 1950 in most of his pictures. It's probably not a co-incidence that he was authorised to paint Disney characters and often did so, as the Magic Kingdom is another highly processed form of escapism.

A few years ago I would have made a fairly standard left response to this- alienated workers seek refuge in an idealised past that capitalism promises but will not deliver.

Unfortunately on the left we are starting to idealise the past too- to look back to a social contract that we believe existed from the end of World War ll until the election of Thatcher and Reagan- the years known in France as les trente glorieuses. In 2013 we hardly dare hope to make the world better, we just hope to stop it getting any worse. Virtually all my activity as a trade unionist is an attempt to stop our working conditions deteriorating 'because times are hard now and we have to be realistic.' Things were better in the old days...

Kinkade has something to say about that. If we look at his paintings of houses in the past- the ones we would live in, if only we could- we can see that, almost without exception, they are burning hard on the inside. I do not know if he meant to say it, but the meaning of his pictures is obvious.

If we continue to seek to live in the past we will burn.