Years ago, when I first met Nick Mount, he was teaching me about Major John Richardson in a U of T course called Early Canadian Literature. As I got to know him over beers and in the classroom, I learned more about his disparate interests: graphic novels, aesthetic theory, John Travolta records. He is the best teacher I’ve ever had.

Most recently and fervently, he’s been following the world of street art, and I was glad when I heard that he’d be working with our culture editor, Daniel Baird, on an piece about the rise of the cute in his new area of study. I spoke with Nick recently, upon the publication of his essay in our September issue.

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How did you get interested in street art?

Pretty much everything I get interested in is because of something in the classroom, whether it’s a student that suggested something, or I was searching for an example to illustrate something. Street art falls under the latter category. Actually Mark Kingwell is the genesis of this. I taught his book The World We Want a few years ago, and became very interested in the relationship between art and public space. I was looking for a way to add some images to a lecture about the relationship between the self and public space. Initially I was just looking at public art. But very quickly just searching the Internet, the kind of public art that I found most interesting myself and that spoke most to the kinds of things I was interested in was street art.

Because so much sponsored public art is bad.

Yes it is. A great deal of it is very bad. And a great deal of the unsponsored stuff is also very bad. A lot of the public art tends to come from the art schools, and, for better or worse, I’m not from an art school background, and I’ve gotten a little tired of the conceptual orientation of much of that kind of art. So I was looking for something that engaged the emotions. And for me, street art aims straight at the emotions. And you always have to qualify this: the best of it. Always only the best of it.

So the piece is called “The Renaissance of Cute.” Thinking about this title, what was it, when did it die, when was it reborn, and what is it now?

Well there’s a bit of a con in that title that I hoped nobody would call me on. Renaissance, you’re quite right, implies the rebirth of something quite old. Cute as an aesthetic in Western art is actually not all that old. Let’s date it to—I’m not an art historian—but I’d say nineteenth century at the very latest. Certainly you can find images earlier that we’d recognize today as cute. But in terms of the exploitation of what we now think of as cute—let’s go with big eyes as its hallmark—that dates from the end part of the nineteenth century and takes off with Disney, in the first third of the twentieth century. My point is that cute got, almost from its birth, co-opted by the commercial world and therefore made impossible for serious art.

So it was dead to the art world?

It was dead to the art world, probably almost from its inception. The renaissance is the rebirth of it within what I take to be serious art, and by serious art I mean non-commercial.

So what is it now?

What is what now?

How does what has re-emerged in serious art differ from what was rejected by serious art originally, if at all?

Well, it’s the possibility that these artists—and not just street artists, but Lowbrow artists as well—can now engage with an aesthetic that was off limits to serious artists. Street artists regard themselves as artists, not as commercial artists. In fact, many of them believe themselves to be more skilled than the gallery artists because they spend most of their time trying to learn craft as opposed to theory. For them, the ability to use cute, which was off limits to serious artists, that’s what I mean by the renaissance of it. It came back into use, but it never went away, it never died.

You talk a bit in the piece about how to some extent what we think of as gallery art co-opted elements of graffiti—Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, these people. It seems to me that lowbrow has kind of co-opted some of the ideas of cute. But lowbrow, despite its existence in galleries, has still been ghettoized a bit. So when does the moment come when gallery artists start co-opting the cute.

I think it’s already begun to happen. Some of the artists like Ray Caesar here in Canada, Mark Ryden in the States, are starting to command some pretty serious prices for their work. They’re still largely confined to specialist lowbrow galleries, but they’re selling to people who have just said, ‘I don’t care what the curators tell me, I like that.’ Right now, some gallery artists are recognizing that there’s an excitement surrounding the sales attached to lowbrow art—and the buzz—that they’re a little bit envious of, and some gallery art is starting to lean in that direction. In fact, the easiest way to spot this is that the galleries themselves are starting to lean. Fifteen years ago there were maybe three lowbrow art galleries in all of North America. Now there are hundreds.

Is there a connection between a new group of wealthy young people—people who came up in the nineties and two-thousands, who maybe haven’t gone to the sort of prep schools and universities where they would get a training in conceptual art or art theory—and the appeal of lowbrow?

I don’t think it’s about new money. Money’s not new, it’s been around forever, and there’s always been people who had it and people who didn’t. What has changed is the splintering of tastes in the market which makes it possible to stand up and say, ‘Well, it’s okay if you like that, I like this.’ It’s more permissible now to say, ‘Hey, I love Don Ho. “Tiny Bubbles” is my favourite song.’ When I went to high school, you got beat up for saying that. I think there’s more people who are willing to take their money and redirect it.

Underlying some of your arguments, I think, is a belief that there’s a division between concept and beauty, and that they can’t really coexist.

I think they can coexist, but I think that what’s happened over the last century since Duchamp is that the concept has been the driving force, not the aesthetic. When I say not the aesthetic, I don’t mean just beauty. Sublime, abject, cute, pretty, you name the aesthetic—all of them have taken a back seat to the idea, the concept behind the piece. All of which proved revolutionary to art. Completely transformed art. It opened up, as Arthur Danto said, the range of possibilities for art. Limitless. What is art? Well, it’s what you decide to hang on the walls in the gallery. That’s the only working definition. In a sense, it’s been incredibly fruitful for artists and galleries. And some of it, I’m not against it, the concepts can be quite provocative, quite interesting. But I think it gets tired. I’m tired of it.

But do you find beauty in any of it?

This is going to get back into that tricky territory of, ‘Well, I think a cow floating in preservative fluids is beautiful.’ People will generally raise that red flag. They’ll say, ‘Well what do you know, I think that’s beautiful. I think Picasso’s cubist prostitutes are beautiful.’ I can’t stop you from thinking that. There are always subjective elements to it. But I think that beauty is something that we all know when we see it, and its primary qualities are quite recognizable and quite consistent over the centuries. Harmony. Peacefulness. Clarity. Those are not things that I would attribute to a cow floating in formeldahyde. I just find that an awful lot of it is by artists, for artists. And I have nothing against that. I think it’s probably better than making bombs for a living.

But the kind of art I find more interesting is the kind of art that’s willing to engage with the emotions, and that starts at—doesn’t end up at—starts at a goal of accessibility. We’ve tended to equate accessibility with simplicity. And time and again artists rise up to show us we were wrong about that. Hemingway would be a good example of someone showing us how completely wrong we were about associating sophistication with a baroque style. Simple style, incredibly sophisticated art. It’s not as easy as it looks, though, to do this kind of work. It requires a great deal of skill. A great deal of prep.

Is that what I’m sensing in what you’re saying, that the people we could group as great artists from the nineteenth century and previous were doing work at an extremely high level of craft, and an extremely high level of skill that is at once extraordinarily complex in its framework but completely accessible.

Lowbrow artists are a very diverse bunch, and they have a wide range of influences. Everything from hot rods to comics to psychaedelic. But when they talk about painters who’ve influenced them, not one of them that I’ve read about, that I know about, has ever mentioned a painter after the beginning of the twentieth century. They all go back to at least the end of the nineteenth century, and most of them go back to the Renaissance, to the old masters. Because it’s the technique that turns them on. That’s why they left art school, these guys. They went to art school thinking I could learn how to paint like that. And they got to art school and they got Foucault and Derrida. At art school.

So many of them left. Same with street artists. They’ve got astonishingly consistent biographies. These people go to art school for a couple of years, they drop out, they go to Europe, they go around the museums, they see all this art, and they come home and start teaching themselves how to paint like that. They start learning techniques that artists—serious artists—haven’t used for a century. Like scumbling, like Dan Witz does. Chris Ware would be a classic example. Chris Ware dropped out of art school because nobody would teach him how to draw.

And he knows how to draw.

He knows how to draw! And he studied, he bought old books, he learned draftsmanship, advertising styles, fonts, everything he possible could, all skills, all crafts. Now I should say that there are pieces of conceptual art that have aesthetic appeal. I’m drawing a rough distinction between the primary goal of the work—the primary goal is the concept; the primary goal is the aesthetic. Lowbrow, one of the consistent refrains in Lowbrow, is that they’re interested in the art for itself. Not quite the same thing as art for art’s sake, but close.

In the piece, you talk about the idea of street artists co-opting the ideas and approaches of commerce. It seems to me that a big part of the brand created is tied in to the anonymity of the artist—it’s mysterious, vigilante. There’ve even been theories that Banksy is a collective of artists. You saw the Daily Mail’s report that they believe they’ve figured out who Banksy is, through pretty convincing research. What does it do to his art, his brand, if he’s Robin Gunningham.

I don’t think it does anything. I think it’s about as moot a question as the debate about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. We have the plays. We have the art. Who did them ultimately doesn’t matter to me all that much. The thing that got me interested in this is that, because of my training, when I see an artist using a commercial tactic, as an English teacher, the instant assumption is to think parody, irony—that’s what we do. And it took me ages to stop using my theory and start using my eyes and see that these guys aren’t doing parody, they aren’t being ironic. All they’re doing is taking everything they’ve been exposed to their whole lives, a brand culture, and they’re using it for themselves.

If Banksy is a collective, he has predecessors. The London Police is a collective that has worked in much the same way, kept itself anonymous, at least until recently (when it first started we had no idea, though we know all the members now). I think it’s a war, a war that’s taking place for control of the streets, control over what we see on our streets. And I think the street artists of today have quite wisely decided that they’re not going to limit themselves to the weapons of the past. They’re going to use the weapons that are available to them.

The weapons of the past being?

Graffiti. Aesthetics that work against commerce.

So instead they’re accepting commerce, saying ‘we’ll work within…’

They’re saying, ‘My god! Look how powerful the Nike swoosh is!’ Let’s borrow that, let’s use that, let’s use their weapons. I think that’s what it’s about. They grew up inside a branded world.

So why are people so fascinated? If you say it’s not going to change the art, it’s not going to change what the art means, why are people so fascinated?

Well we’re always fascinated with that, right? We always want to know who did it. We’ve been hunting for Shakespeare’s identity since there was Shakespeare. Biography matters to us a great deal. It’s a Romantic notion—the artist as individual genius—and we want to believe that we can identify and point to that. It’s completely human. Completely forgivable. Just not necessary, that’s all.

Tags: art, interview

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Posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.