Highbrow/Lowbrow Art

It's all about the unibrow art and its battle in the field, since around 1900. Frida Kahlo, et al. Unibrow art is about the ultimate balance between both hemispheres of the brain; the unibrow being symbolic of the merging. Expression of ideas not dominated by one side or the other. Forget what unibrow artists create- it's about their eyebrows and connection thereof. That is the art. Their eyebrows are their life statement. Dali's mustache was actually a rebellion against the unibrow scene; a mustache, the concept of artistic enlightenment being achieved above the lip, not above the eyes. Dali's rebellion can be seen in his psychedelics fueled surrealist paintings; mostly about the non-permanent nature of unibrow (hence, the melting)-- "My reality, is one with the eyebrows separated." In his later portrait photos, you can clearly see Dali's eyebrows separated artificially, by flame. Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. was a pioneer in the mustache/anti-unibrow movement; "dada" actually an onomatopoeia for "da- da-", the two eyebrows; i.e. the eyebrows should be separated.

To this day, the Mustache VS Unibrow battle continues, and "highbrow" and "lowbrow" are merely referring to underground and academically/classically based ideologies for and against mustaches and/or unibrows. This has carried-on in all forms of art. As one can note in Richard D James- he chooses to find a balance between half-unibrowism and mustache+beardism, attempting to set new standards, with his most important contribution being the assumption that both unibrow and mustache schools have false theories with regard to artistic enlightenment.

Wonderful post.

Wayne White comes to mind. There is a good doc on Netflix Instant on him.

Holy shit I love that guy. Thanks for the heads up.

  On 7/8/2013 at 6:41 AM, mat said:

Wayne White comes to mind. There is a good doc on Netflix Instant on him.

  On 7/8/2013 at 6:48 AM, Candiru said:

Holy shit I love that guy. Thanks for the heads up.

You know when you find out about someone for the first time yet realize you've loved their work for years or even decades. That just happened with me reading about Wayne White.

I remember someone on NPR saying this was a marriage or low and high brow art:

http://vimeo.com/2909820

  On 7/7/2013 at 5:49 AM, delet... said:

or alphonse mucha, more commercial art that is high art.

 

I love Mucha and Art_Nouveau in general.

Little more food for thought: Middlebrow

^ lol, (Oprah's Book of The Month club cited)

Also I had no idea Lowbrow was a specific art movement term after the 70s, I just always thought of the more general opposing concept to highbrow/high culture and fine art.

I think Tiki Culture and Atomic Age aesthetics spawned some high brow/low brow hybrid achievement in Exotica and Space_age_pop music, respectively. The Tiki fad and subculture was pure 1950s kitsch but the exotica music of composers like Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter, and Martin Denny was second to none in terms of recording quality and embraced influences and instruments from non-Western sources. It was often a hodge-podge of impressionist orchestration, multiple traditional music sources, and animal noises.

There's Raymond Scott too of course:

http://youtu.be/MRuJ82CnEGI

Actually, Tropicália is about the best example I can come up with, it was a Brazilian artistic movement in the late 60s that aimed to combine all aspects of Brazilian culture with avant-garde and pop culture. The core of it's idea was based off this 1928 manifesto entitled Antropofagia that argued Brazil's culture and society thrived by cannibalizing other cultures. They sought to expand on that even further. It managed to anger both Brazilian leftists who denounced rock music and other "imperialist" culture and the military government in power, who were brazenly criticized by Tropicalia artists. It's great music but the whole movement was also incredibly prophetic of postmodern pop music that emerged decades later.

This is a great compilation and brief on the music that came from it, and this album is essentially the magnum opus of the collective movement:

http://youtu.be/B-_loVXEv6M