The Fine Art of Lowbrow Marketing

For as far back as I can remember, I've always had the art bug.

My mother tells me that as an infant, my favorite toys were crayons. If I wasn't coloring everything in site from newspapers to wallpaper, I was eating them. After they were rescued from becoming baby vomit and I got a bit fussy, she'd set me down in front of a well-worn copy of Thompson's Masterpieces of Italian Painting and I'd become all eyes and smiles again. In fact, paintings and illustrations have always held a special allure for me.


In the fourth grade I was sent home from school for selling lewd caricatures to fellow students -for a mere dollar apiece!

When I was reprimanded (and temporarily suspended) I was genuinely shocked. When asked why I had drawn "such filth," I responded that I couldn't understand how anyone with an ability to do so would ever paint or draw anything but a naked lady. After that they offered to skip me a grade.

At the time I honestly didn't consider my depiction of Mrs. Laughlin* to be "filthy" or even in bad taste. I didn't doodle her actual dimensions; I gave her Sue Storm hips and Red Sonja nips. I took it as a compliment that anyone (never mind everyone) could easily recognize my sketch as an idealized nude of the prettiest kindergarten teacher north of Boston. I didn't get kicked out of school and I didn't skip a grade, but I did get a drafting table for Christmas and went from copying the styles of Harvey Kurtzman and Michael Kaluta to collecting original art from Jack Kirby and Gil Kane. And it only spiraled from there.

My arrival in Los Angeles coincided with the first crashing wave of the Lowbrow art movement, and within a few brief years I was able to transform an innocent hobby into a lucrative business: buying and selling comic book art. By 1992 I was buying entire issues of comic art from people like Simon Bisley and Brendan McCarthy. It was a quick way to turn a buck at a time when Wall Street speculators were gearing up to kill the comic book industry completely. Perhaps a step ahead of them (and then again perhaps not) I made a lateral switch to collecting and dealing in uncommercial pop art.

This was a far cry from Warhol and Lichtenstein. These were works by the lesser known (at the time) and more irreverent painters of the Kustom Kulture scene. These guys were drawing or designing the majority of the cool concert posters available in the late 80's and early 90s for now legendary venues like CBGB's, Emo's, Jabberjaw and Hammerstein Ballroom. Kozik, Coop and Pizz may have been the bastard sons of Robert Williams and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, but fame didn't happen overnight them any more than it did for Bob and Ed. I should know: I lugged five gigantic tubes of their posters all over Tokyo back in 1993 -in the snow (uphill both ways!), and managed to sell a single, stinkin' Beastie Boys poster.

As a matter of fact, it wasn't until the original Underground Artists (S. Clay Wilson, Robert Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and the aforementioned Robert Williams)got back together to launch ZAP 13 that the Lowbrow Movement as a whole was even recognized by the legit art world. By 1995, R. Crumb had been the focus of an Oscar-worthy documentary, Williams paintings adorned the covers of multiple platinum-selling records, and original 60's psychedelic rock posters were fetching thousands of dollars on a fledgling website called eBay.

Rather than forge a crevasse between the lowbrow artists of the past and present, it created an umbrella under which both thrived. With original Williams paintings now costing upwards of fifty-thousand dollars each, young collectors invested in the next wave of Pop Surrealism and built careers for people like Mark Ryden, Shag and Shepard Fairey. It was this new term that caught the attention of Madison Avenue, and even Disney embraced the work of lowbrow wunderkind Gary Baseman to produce an animated film based on his creation, Teacher's Pet.

Whereas the original lowbrow art was an embrace of ugly, the new school had a heavy lean towards cute. B-movie monsters and hot rods were replaced by Walter & Margaret Keane's bulbous-headed, sad-eyed children as a primary influence. And guess what? It took off like a shot. While Mark Ryden has only exhibited about 80 paintings in his entire career, a painting in his recent Japanese show reportedly sold for a million dollars. Todd Schorr's last gallery show was primarily prints -for a thousand bucks each.

All this during the worst economic slump in ages...

Well, comic book and horror movie fans have known for years what the rest of the culture seems to just be learning: cute sells. Compare the box office of Near Dark with Lost Boys. Contrast the subscription sales of Ms. Tree to the heavily reprinted adventures of The Rocketeer. I'm in no way criticizing the easier-on-the-eyes selections mentioned above -I wore one of those "Sleep all day. Party all night. It's fun to be a vampire," buttons on my jean jacket all through tenth grade, and I still have a Dave Stevens' Bettie "Wow" poster in my den. But in each case, the less attractive is as worthy and deserving of attention (perhaps more so) as the more successful example.

Decades later, as I've grown from casual fan and some-time practitioner to frequent patron and occasional curator, I still can't explain what it is about the way Dave Stevens draws women that still taps into that adolescent exhilaration I experienced the first time I saw the cover of Alien Worlds #2. It just does. Likewise, I can't pinpoint exactly what it was about my prepubescent portrait of elementary school faculty that generated such commotion over thirty years ago.

But I am now willing to admit that there's more to art than just naked ladies.

I may not be sure what that "more" is, but I'm willing to accept the possibility...