“The best place to learn about a culture, to really uncover what they were about

on a daily basis is to dig through its garbage.”

– Louis Leakey 1966

 

We’re told there’s a high wall between the high and the low, between pop culture and real art, and it is a foundational insummitable barrier that can be, only by the grace and choosing of the high end side of this fence, breach it. In illustration for example, breaking all the rules of the medium itself for its own sake, ends up being a bad illustration. However when you do this in “fine art” it’s ART. This is a physical fact of each medium that almost entirely is what differentiates one from the other as a fact of how they are and what their goals are. But we often mistake that for its importance. The trick though is not assuming the premise as a given when it comes to value.


I myself was full disclosure, trained up and thru art school in Brooklyn to chase admire and seek out the fine art world as a superior high plane to reach as an artist, but I also became inspired by to make art in the first place through the pop culture I was drowned in as a child coming up. So there’s a conflict in there, but it’s really born of one between what I’m supposed to want and what I wanted. Which as you grow up you realize is no contest at all- and the sooner you figure that out, the better for you. I make unabashedly pop-culture work, whether it’s the key art for movies, posters, LP soundtracks, Comics, Children’s picture books, or Graphic Novels of my own making. I don’t want an audience of a handful of the very special, I prefer a mass larger audience to show my work to- that’s  an entirely different kind of interactivity and conversation. I do however bring the fine art sensibilities I was trained in into my pop culture work, it’s obvious in my compositions and approaches, and especially in my obsession with portraiture and that long and deep history in painting and drawing it comes from. But I’ve come to realize that while there is a culturally assumed line of value between pop culture and high culture… I would suggest it too like the previous barrier is a fiction, and at best, a lie agreed upon.

 

I did technically grow up in a large city, but Houston, Texas wasn’t really an urban landscape as much as it was a massive sprawling suburb with a largely empty city area builtin the middle- like donut. Texas culture then and there wasn’t really as big on art so much as it was hooked on football, bbq, money, oil and cattle. And of course the hats. So being an artist there, especially a young one who doesn’t even know he is an artist yet,  meant getting your inspiration where you could, and for me that meant tv, movies and books. There’s little wonder my decades long book obsessive career persists given those roots laid so deep. While attending an arts highschool there finally opened me up to the amazing deep well of art in a small area of the other side of town, The Menil and Fine Arts and Contemporary Arts Museums, The Rothko Chapel… my gaze flew northward to the other side of that wall, and largely I think now as a siren song to escape Texas as its greater value than any deep abiding belief in being a major part of the history of painting of whatever. So Pratt in NYC was a big fat rocket booster right to the wellspring of that lofty thinking. And I drunk over deep of that well in those years for sure, just as the presumed Olympian Mounts of the Fine Arts World there was being subsumed by the fashion and wall street industries. Even while I made my big impressive-by-scale charcoal drawings that were so opaque to any meaning at all, I was secretly writing and drawing my own comics. We weren’t supposed to dabble in such sins. This was Pratt after all… “Did you see that new Terry Winters show at The Whitney?” “You do comics for the irony, right? Like Lichenstein?”. The conflict had hit its peak and it wasn’t long after graduation that being in the real world where having to work to support yourself left little time for quibbling over what you think you should be and what you want to do. I started pitching to DC/Vertigo and elsewhere right away, and went full bore months after graduation into my first creator owned graphic novel, Sudden Gravity. I made a choice, but I don’t think it really needs to be one. At least not creatively speaking.

Full confession, I do support the pop culture side of things in this article over the fine art side as a basic premise too. Not just because I have a dog in this race, mostly because I’m not sure I believe in the race at all. I think much of this is high culture’s fault and cross to bear. There was a time when artists were more akin to the spirit of their role in the society the dwelled in or near that Joseph Campbell often spoke about as the “Shamans of the Village”. We communicated through images the truths or stories of the worlds to a largely illiterate population, as any major cathedral and its art and stained glass will testify to. It grew into a medium that started making work only for the high society patrons and as that always goes, the money influenced its purpose and began to direct it’s course, becoming more and more rarified and refined until art started only speaking to itself, and artists only to each other.

Pop Culture never gave up on its audience, or walked away for greater regard. It was proud of itself for itself, and it quietly shaped the culture through its kids, making them less afraid of black families so they might be willing to vote for its first black president. For unmasking the horrors of our country’s overseas policies on our televisions creating our country’s first fulsome nation wide revolt against a war. Even hiding deep astrophysics and quantum theory ideas in the plots and story dynamics of Land of the Lost. (It also gave us Barney just so we can agree it’s not all golden apples).

Pop culture is the mask that hides the true spirit of a society. It is the lodestone from which we speak to ourselves and our future as a people. It is the main energy source for thought and change or sublimation that pervades children’s literature, the stories we tell over campfires, the fantasies we watch on tv and in the movies, the books and tales we digest in between our other obligations, the gods we kneel to on days we decide are holier than others. They are the hidden truths we speak to ourselves just behind the veil of the genre they nestle into, whether it’s behind the flash of a lightsaber, a shield of House Stark, the poisoned apple offered to Snow White, or fairy tales we read to our kids at night. They are in us and everywhere around us and for the most part, not regarded much at all beyond the surface flashes and distractions of their clothes. But just beyond that covering lies the secret face of the world we spin for ourselves and each other. Being hidden isn’t what makes them weak, or hiding- as if brandishing these ideas loudly on the walls of the Whitney Biennial, or Metropolitan Museum of Art is an act of bravery for being obvious and direct. Pop Culture infests us from within, sneaks its way into our conscious through the dreams we dream together as a nation. It is the knife at night that changes the future by encouraging our base and animalistic selves in Where the Wild Things Are, or simply watching a family that happens to be black on a tv sitcom that feeds a generation that would vote to elect its first black president even ahead of where the nation might be with regards to race overall. High culture is what the privileged sip at from a place of ponderous comfort where Pop Culture is where the revolution is born and the aspirational rises. 

 

 

Remember even the highest of high culture was at some point pop culture in its time. The cathedral stained glass effigies in their lauded magnificence were merely ways to communicate the stories of the bible to an illiterate society. The story of Antigone was part of a cathartic theater experience for ancient greeks to contextualize their lot in life, and support the overall system of government. Shakespeare and charles dickens we published in pop magazines and pamphlets meant for the masses. Time is the elevator of Leakey’s society of trash into fine art. But we forget this and assume the more high minded lofty environs we place these in were always superior to what we now make and craft today, and use them to disregard and demean their pop culture contemporaries as facile, to make a small few of us feel superior in their blindness to the art that surrounds them on their cereal boxes, crappy daytime soap operas and superhero movies.

 

This is not also to say this is a democracy where the value is won by the most votes for it. We celebrate and raise up WHERE THE WOLD THINGS ARE almost as much for its shared longevity and success as for the story’s value but ignore that it was an absolute unread failure the first few years after it was published.  Is it a better book because it’s more popular now than it was? Of course not. Nothing on the page changes one iota. We move past the secret code of pop culture references and even change their meaning outside of their born into medium all the time. Look at how much the bible has been rewritten all these centuries, or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or even how we clumsily try to reinvent the story of slavery in our country’s building. Pop culture informs our shared language in a way other forms of art can never come close to touching. This is an aspect where pop culture’s scale of audience commands its success: Because you can quip “I have a bad feeling about this” and most people will get the reference to Star Wars, is proof of it and of its impact on language itself. We even got ourselves a non-meta meta experience Star Trek show that met aliens who se entire language was pure cultural self reference- you could hear and understand the words they were saying but never the meaning. Pop Culture can dive deeper than most because of it’s presumed ubiquity and the masks it brandishes as a quality. It strives for the audience to understand more, and rewards them for seeking understanding where fine art can tend to vamp it’s murkiness and lack of communication as a value. 

Art that is understood, is understood more wildly. I know it sounds patently stupid and obvious, but there’s a hidden value there- another way of saying it is the more bespoke your message is, the less it carries through the culture. Getting mad that your paper on the dialectic polemics of Platonic philosophy vs Hegelian Phenomenology is going to get lost no most people. Turning that into a narrative in a fantasy setting can shift culture forever. 

And It doesn’t matter if that is the intention anyway. Pop Culture can accidentally speak to major themes in its background without even knowing it. The shaman’s trance finds the underground wellspring of the societies dreams and speaks them back to itself. Did the creators of the original 1930’s King Kong know consciously they were making a film about slavery? Likely no, but that’s the movie they made anyway, and exactly why the ones that followed that skipped this deeper subtext, landed flat. King King without the slave narrative is just a big monkey on the loose in NYC. Yawn. The work and the execution are all that matter in the end. It is a legitimate argument that Guillermo Del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH speaks more deeply and fulsomely to the Spanish Civil War than Pablo Picasso’s GUERNICA does. The high mind can often lead to the naval gaze that the low mind zooms right past- not as an accident of its focus but entirely because its focus is on the story, not making sure it’s delivering its polemic on the concepts using a story to do it. 

I would bet money on who wins a fight of expressing the tenets of existentialism succinctly in the Rick and Morty episode “Rick Potion #9” than Albert Camus expressed in “The Stranger” any day and every day. Does this mean that Camus is therefore not as valuable? Of course not, but it might be important to recognize it might fulfill its goals or its purpose as successfully for its obliqueness and high minded approach- a better hybrid might be to cite Holden Caulfield’s arc in CATCHER IN THE RYE. Camus shouts to the rarified where Rick and Morty whispers to the rest of us. The Kathe Kollwitz part of me always prefers the latter if for no other reason than loyalty to its role as a mirror to society. Whether it sees it or not is not pop art’s place to command, it’s responsibilities end with its reflection.

From the revelation the Raft of the Medusa gave to rarified few of 19th Century audience that was privileged to see it in person, but now in Watching the grandeur of Nux flying his war machine into the rocks of the world that doomed them and freed the women stuck in the male yoke of the wasteland. We are awash in pop culture that means something more than just selling popcorn at the movies or ad time on the tv at home. Whether it’s Luke Skywalker following the hero’s journey as described by Campbell, or the Bear exposing the brutal abusiveness of alcoholic families, more and more of us are turning our attention back to the pure fires, leaving the current fine art-world in a bit of a free-fall of it’s own self indulgence and narcissism to follow what we can do and tell now. The revolution it seems WAS televised after all. Like a bird in cage with the door open, the delights and wonderments of pop culture are ready to receive you. and like that same cage, the deadening suffocation of the boxing of our valuables is a cage we don’t have to sit in if we don’t want to.

 

Things are changing and fast- we are seeing a lot of lofty creatives bemoan pop cultural expressions and popularity as a sign of our social decay, a tearing down of the structures of the art world as if its that world from where art comes, not the artists who make the work that fills it. The wall is porous now and permission is being at least self-given to race across and through it whenever desired. More and more gallery shows and art movements are becoming indistinguishable from illustration world work and creatives. We’re getting smarter, broader and less rigid in our thinking. And more and more those who cling to the fallen barrier still as an essential value signaling look more and more ridiculous for it. As every day seems a little bit more intense and sped up compared to the one before both the advent of pop culture as a legitimate medium for making and sharing meaningful art as it is for the rage against the collapsing walls of the refined territories of high society. It’s a bumpy and sometimes grotesque ride that never ends until we all do, but while there remains at least two people on the planet that can share a language, heroes will be born between them. Legends, mysteries, lies and spiritual ecstasy will draw from them and the touchstone for the human experience awaits. So just like Neo tells us about the Spoon, there is no division there, not really. So let’s cut loose wasting time on the assumption and really get to it- there’s exciting stories to tell.

If you doubt me look around at my recent campaign art for The Last of Us Season 2 for HBO, Variety with David Fincher on his film Mank, or Empire Magazine’s alt arthouse coversor the work NEON is producing or visit Mutant and Coda, Sacred Bones and Bottleneck Gallery, Nautilus, and Black Dragon Press where high art crashes into  pop culture in the most sublime ways. A-list serious directors are directing tv shows and superhero films, and so many artists taking seriously the true heart of the pop culture icons they get to steward on any given project. There are SO many places now where the high and low dance together and this is from a guy who lived in the dark days when it was literally shameful to be caught reading a comic or graphic novel on the subway. We are growing into ourselves being raised by our cultural myths primarily through our pop culture and the high rarified continues to shrink and as its most telling sign, survive from the pop culture it now reflects and feeds upon for subject matter.

And have an amazing Holiday and Popping New Year!