Are you Low Brow?

This raises a couple of the many unspoken melodramas underlying Lowbrow and its discontents. Illustrators, much like architects, are often visually gifted persons who could have been players in the mainstream art world, but for whatever mixture of socioeconomic pressures — family expectations, financial obligations, or just not wanting to shell out 30 grand to be told what you’re doing is wrong and then having to work as a gallery lackey for the rest of your life to pay off your student loans — decided to forgo the cultural cachet and complex protocols of capital-A Art and peddle their skills directly to the mass-media marketplace. In spite of its primary function of producing luxury conversation pieces for the wealthy, the art world still affects a surface disdain for commerce. Most illustrators — and most of the Lowbrow world — are unabashed capitalists, placing their trust in the marketplace as the only fair arbiter of aesthetic quality.