I'll take the high ground

UG. don't even get me started on the lowbrow craze. LA loves this shit. I don't care if you like emo painings or if you just discovered shepard fairey last weekend but when it starts to infiltrate the regular market, we got problems. The prices are different. The history is different. The *collector* is different. Or at least they used to be.

excerpts from The Lowbrow sickness continues to spread, from Burbank to Laguna by Doug Harvey (did i mention the article even covers tiki-art...wow. so much to learn. so little time for nausea.)

...The very success of the Lowbrow movement may curb those features that once distinguished it from ‘Highbrow’ art, with its rules and value judgments.

...Many of the past decade’s art-world stars were exploring the same mass-media-savvy sex-’n’-surrealism-tinged figuration that is Lowbrow’s bread and butter — and I’m talking everything from John Currin’s oily Russ Meyerisms to Matthew Barney’s self-lubricating architectural symbol orgies. With borders dissolving all around it, and lucrative cross-marketing with such Hot Topic–promoted lifestyle brands as “Goth,” “Skateboard,” “Punk Rock” and “Outsider Art,” the Lowbrow movement may have expanded beyond any identity distinguishable from the hipness-saturated mainstream. It’s just so hard to get a handle on the big picture.

...The show also pointedly blurs distinctions by including such Art World luminaries as Mike Kelley, Takashi Murakami, Jim Shaw, Llyn Foulkes and Paul “Flying Poo” McCarthy, as well as boundary-straddling works by Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Phil Frost and other exemplars of the Beautiful Losers school...