In the West, highbrow cute is mostly limited to the art world’s grudging acceptance of cute from elsewhere, so long as it brings buzz and buyers. Superflat at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim. Banksy at Sotheby’s. Last spring, Lowbrow’s champion, Mark Ryden, sold one of his hauntingly cute little girls for $800,000 (US) before his show at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles had even opened. With prices like that, moma can’t be far behind.
It’s not just the Madonnas and Michael Jacksons snapping up these very precious moments. Lowbrow happily sells itself to the credit card crowd in limited edition books, prints, and merchandise, especially in the apocalyptic world of very cute, very expensive designer toys. Lowbrow artist Gary Baseman prefers the term “Pervasive Art” to Lowbrow or Pop Surrealism, partly to stress its accessibility. But the term also intentionally highlights Lowbrow’s willingness to be art or product, whatever the customer wants.
Street art is also selling briskly these days. Banksy was again on the auction block in January, this time on eBay, where another, larger moron offered the owner of a building in West London £208,100 for his wall — Banksy included, removal extra. The London Police, D*Face, Fafi, and other popular street artists have turned their cute characters into stickers, prints, toys, and T-shirts. Like many graffiti artists before him, the American artist Dalek has all but quit street art for gallery sales and commercial work for Sony, Nike, Altoids, mtv, Rookie Skateboards, and Calvin Klein, among others.
It’s easy to sniff at all this, to feel the same suspicion of contamination by commerce that gave beauty away to the billboards. But art lost its virginity long ago. Retail cute just exposes what art struggles to hide beneath its Kantian disinterest: our hard-wired desire to possess beauty, to touch it, cuddle it, make love to it. If we’re not rich enough to own the original, we’ll take a calendar and a fridge magnet, please.
Which is why Dan Witz, the godfather of New York street art, calls it the most radical development in art since abstraction — because it’s not for sale. Because, like sunsets, street art precludes ownership. Because street art is challenging the past century’s surrender of beauty and its attendants to commerce.
It is an uneven contest. On one side, busy buffers and busier billboards, not to mention the odd street crazy or diehard tagger. On the other, art that’s hard to see from a car, that disappears almost as fast as it appears, and that is mostly banal crap. So is most other art, but street art suffers as much as it gains from its lack of filters, the editors and dealers who protect us — usually — from Aunt May’s sonnets and Cousin Navdeep’s “representations of the dialectics of negative space.”
Against all that, street art survives by learning from the enemy. Instead of graffiti’s tags, illegible and indistinguishable to outsiders, street art prefers clear, distinct signatures, what the London Police and others openly call their “brand.” Banksy and Above sign their names in a commercial stencil font. D*Face signs in the same script as Disney’s logo. Street art’s cartoon characters owe much to necessity, to the need to get up quickly and distinctively, but they also borrow the cartoon’s iconic blank slate, which has allowed millions to see themselves in a mouse, and the mouse to make millions for its owners. Street art takes from commerce not just art’s surrendered aesthetics, but commerce’s own designs, styles, and tactics. It’s not parody: it’s recovery, with interest.
From the abject to the sublime, aesthetics evoke feelings that all people have before they suggest concepts that only some people know. But like beauty, the cute unites accessibility with pleasure, the marriage that made Disneyland. Twentieth-century art surrendered this tremendous power because a toilet taught it that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sure it is, but as both long experience and recent science show, we agree more often than not, agreement that cuts across class, gender, age, and even race. And right about now, our cities could use some public reminders of our shared humanity.
Beauty’s fragility compels our care. We protect beautiful paintings in museums; we try to preserve as long as we can beautiful flowers and beautiful faces. But the beautiful is also powerful. Helen weakened the knees of Paris; Bambi has weak knees. Because of its helplessness, the cute needs our protection more than the beautiful, and so might arouse us even more than beauty does to extend our care from the extraordinary artwork to the ordinary person. Especially outdoors. In 2005, Banksy reprised his balloon girl in a silhouette on the West Bank wall of a young girl being lifted over the wall by a bouquet of balloons.
Street art loves the cute because street art loves the streets. Like any good art, in other words, it matches its aesthetic to its content. It finds pleasure in line, colour, and context, in providing what the London Police call “free smiles for anyone willing to lend us an eye.” Street art looks at the city through the eyes of a child — sometimes sad, sometimes angry, as children will sometimes be, but more often playful, curious, hopeful. Banksy’s balloon girl is a self-portrait.
