Art of the Arcade

The Deluxx Fluxx Arcade is an interactive art installation by street artists Faile and Bast based around original 80s-era arcade consoles.

via Nerdcore | Official Website

Comic Book Character Costume

An artist from MAC Cosmetics painted a woman as a comic book character for Halloween -- right down to the dot printing style of old comics books. Or, alternatively, as a figure from a Roy Lichtenstein painting.

The pictures were taken by publicist and photographer Tasha Marie. You can view more at the link.

Link via Geekologie Artist's/Company Website

Shepard Fairey, Plagiarist

I'm not a fan of Shepard Fairey's politics, but I love his artwork. It's vibrant, vivid stuff. A pity that it's not actually his. After his lawyers ditched him for lying to them, he admitted that he did steal an image from the Associated Press as the basis of his famous "Hope" poster of President Obama.

It gets worse: here's a post from 2007 by a man named Mark Vallen showing, image by image, how much work Fairey has plagiarized. (H/T)

Had Fairey identified himself as a collage artist and been upfront about his incorporation of outside images, there would be no ethical issue at stake. There might be legal issues for copyrighted images, of course, but not an ethical one.

The work in Fairey's portfolio is simply stunning and I'd love to have many of these images adorn the walls of my home. They remain beautiful. They're just not Fariey's.

Art Blogging: Jeremiah Ketner

Jeremiah Ketner is a Chicago-based artist who depicts colorful, carefree, images of flowers and fairies. He met and married a Japanese woman who took him to Japan. Ever since, he has been mesmerized by modern Japanese aesthetics, and it shows in his work. Ketner is drawn to a simplicity that he finds in nature, particularly flowers. He studied at the Columbus College of Art and Design and the Southern Illinois University. Take Me To Your Special Place, acrylic on wood, 2007.
Mushroom Snacks For Our Serpent, acrylic on wood, 2008.
Another Tomorrow, acrylic on wood, 2008.

You can read an interview with Ketner here. The best part:

What is the strangest comment anyone has ever made about your artwork?

One guy thought I was an Asian female. Then he met me, and seemed highly disappointed.

Art Blogging: Caia Koopman

Caia Koopman is an American Pop Surrealist artist. For readers unfamiliar with that term, Pop Surrealism is a movement closely affiliated with lowbrow. But as Ms. Koopman identifies herself as a Pop Surrealist, I'll do her the courtesy of using that name.

Koopman was raised in Southern California, where she studied art at the University of Santa Cruz and became associated with the skateboarder culture. In an interview with Juxtapoz, she said of her work:

My girls are tethered to the earth by all its cycles, they are surrounded by and part of life, death and beauty....My biggest overall influence is the idea of humans being part of nature rather than separate from it.

You can get a good sense of this organic ideal in her work from these examples. Up first: Chemical Girl, acrylic on canvas, 2009.



Entomology 5 (Ismene), acrylic on wood, 2008.

Dancis, acrylic on canvas.

Art Blogging: Saelee Oh

Saelee Oh is an American painter and cut paper artist. A native of Los Angeles, she attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She is known for her playful, romantic depictions of fairy tale environments.

Art Blogging: Audrey Kawasaki

Audrey Kawasaki is an American painter. She was born and raised in Los Angeles by Japanese immigrant parents and studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her primary subject matter is women on wood panels, in fact, one particular theoretical woman:

All my pieces, all my girls, are a portrayal of his one particular being. They are all portraits of her. maybe physically different, but ultimately its she who i am conveying. I am addicted to her, she haunts me. She is my obsession. My love. My drive. My muse. My curse. My unattainable.

When I paint/draw, it’s like a desperate search for her. Painting is like digging. Sometimes I find her. Sometimes not. Though even if I do capture a glimpse of her, she’ll often immediately fade away. Never is she forever captured in my paintings, and that what makes it so interesting to me. It’s the hunt, the chase, that makes it so thrilling.

She is strongly influenced by manga and Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, as is quite evident in her both haunting and sensual work.

As I Fall, 2008.
If Only You Were Here, 2008.

Karamari, 2008.

Art Blogging: Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey (1970- ) is an American lowbrow artist. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, he studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is now lives in Los Angeles and is a prolific graphic designer.


Fairey rose to national attention with this 2008 screenprint of Barack Obama. You can read an interview of Fairey about this iconic work here.







Peace Woman, 2008.






Tyrant Boot, 2008.




War By Numbers, a stencil collage.

Art Blogging: Niagara Detroit

Niagara Detroit (1956- ) is an American lowbrow artist. She originally started in music as the frontperson for the 80s punk band Destroy All Monsters. Her initial forays into the visual arts were in cover art, where Detroit established her motif of dangerous, sultry women. Her first gallery exhibit in 1996 was appropriately titled "All Men Are Cremated Equal". Are these works unsophisticated? Detroit said "I don’t care about making art that only talks to other artists."



Ahh, so romantic. Takes me back to the days when my wife and I were dating.

How Juxtapoz Magazine Changed the World

Greg Beato has a new article up at Reason about the upcoming 100th issue of Juxtapoz, the magazine that ushered in the Lowbrow Art movement. This led to an egalitarianization trend in the art world:

They evoked movie posters, tattoos, comic books, and pulp novels, and while they contained plenty of surrealist ambiguity, they didn't require an aesthetic translator from Artforum to decode them. Fine art, Juxtapoz insisted, could speak to more than just curators, collectors, gallery owners, and critics. It could speak to a much wider audience, and not just from the tastefully generic walls of the nation's most corporate-sponsored museums. A Zippo lighter, a skateboard, a pair of sneakers—they were all potential canvases.

I wrote about this subject previously here. Beato notes that Juxtapoz currently has a higher circulation than any other art magazine in America, including more highbrow fare. Art is for everyone, regardless of artificial social distinctions. Juxtapoz is helping to erode those barriers.

Art Blogging: Isabel Samaras

Isabel Samaras, a native of New York City, attended the Parsons School of Design, where she studied illustration. She lives and works in San Francisco, and is noted for her juxtapositions of Baby Boomer pop culture and iconic images from Western art. A fine example is the painting The Birth of Ginger, a reflection of Gilligan's Island and Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

Wish, which is modeled on La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres. In an interview, Samaras said:

So I hope people looking at the paintings enjoy them as objects of beauty, mystery and humor. How many onion layers they can peel is sort of up to them but I hope they work for people who have no TV/pop culture or art history background just as something interesting, intriguing and lovely. (Even if you knew nothing of Batman or mythology, it should be a compelling image. Who are these people? What are they doing? And why?)

The Judgment of Batman, featuring all three women who played Catwoman on the 1960s TV show. It's modeled on The Judgment of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens. This is one of Samaras' works of oil on a metal tray -- one of her common media.

Highbrow, Lowbrow, Mebrow, Youbrow

John Derbyshire laments the decline of high art in America:

Well, pop culture has always been there; and while it's now pretty much all filth, there are still a few diamonds in amongst the dung — a movie, a song, a sitcom that is fun, even instructive, even moving. It sure has swamped high culture, though, with a mighty assist from the "Higher Superstition" of those college flim-flam courses in literary deconstruction, post-colonial studies, and the like. High culture just ran out of gas some time in the early 20th century. It is now a museum culture: pictures painted 400 years ago, symphonies written 200 years ago, operas, poems, and novels written 100 years ago.

Somewhere in Goebbels' diaries there is a passage that haunts me. He's going down into the bunker for one of the last times, as the allies close on Berlin, and he expresses his joy at the sight of "bourgeois civilization" disappearing in flames. (How they loved their Wagner!) He was of course right. Now we have Madonna, Damien Hirst, Milton Babbitt, Regietheater, and Maya Angelou.

There ain't no such thing as high art and low art, as I've written before. In terms of the work of art itself, there are no distinguishing criteria between fine and commercial arts (tell me why a Jackson Pollock is aesthetically superior to a Mitch McConnell). What separates highbrow culture and lowbrow culture are context and audience.

Was the work created for its own sake, or to sell something? Was it created for a gallery or a magazine? Was it a solitary work or mass produced? These questions determine the context in which the work of art was created.

The answers point us to the audience of the work: who created it and (more importantly) for whom? Was it created for commoners or the elites? This is the only true distinction; the sole reason that there is a motivation to separate high culture from low culture: classism. It is the fear that the lower classes might prefer arts of their own; that they might make aesthetic decisions on their own; and worst of all, that even if given the choice, they might prefer not to hear the aria in the symphony hall or read the confusion of a Joyce novel.

The lower classes might cease to envy the elites. And that would be intolerable.

Art Blogging: Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell is an American lowbrow artist who works in printmaking, painting, illustration, and tattooing. He's 48 years old and lives in Chicago. That's all of the information that I can find, so this won't be one of my more informative art blogging posts. Still, his stuff is quite cool, so it's worth looking at. There's no information about individual images, so I'd only be guessing about media, date, etc. Who cares? Pretty pictures -- just enjoy.

What is Lowbrow Art?

In a comment on a recent post about artist Tara McPherson, Tom Jackson asked "What is Lowbrow art?"

First, a disclaimer: my formal training in art history and criticism consists entirely of one semester-long course in college. And that one ended in the Renaissance. I've managed to pick up a bit here and there about the Academic tradition and Art Deco, but I don't know much after 1940. So bear in mind the lack of expertise in this answer.

The Lowbrow art movement is about fifteen years old and is sometimes traced back to the founding of Juxtapoz magazine in 1994. This movement rejects the distinctions between the fine and commercial arts and the sense that the arts belong to a cultural aristocracy. It could be said to be related to folk art, except that its leaders have actual skill and training. Lowbrow is heavily influenced by pop culture and often exhibits a strong sense of humor and the macabre.

Here are some examples from artists sometimes identified with the Lowbrow movement.

Reading the Tea Leaves by Shag. Acrylic on panel, 2009.

Little Boy Blue by Mark Ryden. Oil on canvas, 2001.

Hope by Shepherd Fairey. Stencil and acrylic on paper, 2008. Now at the Smithsonian.

Pavilion of the Red Clown by Robert Williams.

Leave the Hair and Go Free by Amy Sol. Acrylic on wood panel, 2008.

Self-Defeating by Seonna Hong. Acrylic on canvas, 2007.

Art Blogging: Tara McPherson

Tara McPherson (1976-) is an American illustrator associated with the Lowbrow movement. She studied at the Art Center College of Design in California and now works out of New York City. McPherson has produced noteworthy album covers, commercial illustrations, and graphic novels.

From the Abyss, oil on birch.
Why Do I Do What I Do, acrylic.
Lonely Hearts Gang, Part 2, acrylic.