Low-Brow

Photo courtesy Flickr

An informant in San Francisco found White Walls Gallery’s mid-June show very stimulating. We compared notes about White Walls and the Asian Art Museum, discovering that we appreciate both WW’s forthright presentations and the quiet eloquence of the Brundage collection that’s housed in the Asian facility.

White Wall’s director supports the graphic tradition that began in the mid-Fifties with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s hot rods. Some people call Fifties’ style Populux. American cultural historian Tom Wolfe discusses Roth in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The potent graphics of the Sixties grew out of this school, or skool, and the aesthetic survives around the cracker barrel in the University True-Value hardware store in Seattle. An astrophysicist with an international reputation agrees that this outlet is one of the great art and physics department hardware stores in the world. The critics are tougher than the fasteners.

Juxtapoz magazine serves this community: it is the third largest-selling art magazine in the country, edited by Robert Williams, whose social values Roth questioned. Jux is a source of frank hype for exciting material, and connects art, skaters, and music. Fine Woodworking and the skate magazine Thrasher have also been sources of intelligible criticism not dominated by government grants to the arts.

Avery Brundage was the last director of the international Olympic committee to support amateur competition. In the Sixties, his collection lived in San Francisco's De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. One could reach it by walking down Haight Street through a living gallery of low-brow posters, body paint, and modified vehicles.

The two aesthetics are an unexpected pairing, linked by low-brow’s popular self-determination and the Asian tradition of reclusion. These comments are all I can contribute to art history, except to add English collector Alastair McAlpine’s rule of selection: choose what you like. And then buy it, fast.

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