The Space Between

I love John Seabrook's ideas on "nobrow" culture. It reminds me of the sort of tenants of a lot of postmodernist ideas, and of course of the pop art movement and into the post pop art movement of street art which redefines and reinterprets meanings, lines, boundaries, etc.

"The brand is the price of your admission to the subculture. The brand is neither quite marketing nor culture; it's the catalyst, the filament of platinum that makes culture and marketing combine."

Additionally, as defined by American culture: high and low brow--> intellectuality vs business

"In the United States, though, people needed highbrow-lowbrow distinctions to do the work that social hierarchy did in less egalitarian countries. Any fat cat could buy a mansion, but not everyone could cultivate a passionate interest in Arnold Schoenberg or John Cage."

"In Nobrow, the challenge that élite institutions such as the major museums face is how to bring commercial culture into the fold--how to keep their repertoire vibrant and solvent and relevant without undermining their moral authority, which used to be based, in part, on keeping the commercial culture out."

"In the changing rooms, which are tastefully designed, the fashion psychopath makes an appearance. Buy it, he whispers. Go ahead. Buy it. You know you want it. Then you can be part of that whole hip-hop thing happening down Broadway, while at the same time being secretly above it all. You'd spend two hundred dollars for a dress shirt, so why not a two-hundred-dollar T-shirt that you'll wear a lot more? It's anti-status as status, another important principle in Nobrow."

I loved that at the end of the day, his Jersey tomatoes from Dean & Deluca might as well have been from the 'low-brow' supermarket...

(This is especially comforting because I hate Dean & Deluca, and every day I walk by I just want to mess up all their perfectly placed produce, and break their duck eggs one by one. Ok, so maybe this is the bitterness talking, but seriously, I hate that place.)

All this talk of high and low and 'no' got me thinking of new ways to interpret or assign meaning to things...in this case, Street Art:

Fashion as Street Art

The Sartorialist : While this may not be what is conventionally seen as street art (graffiti, tagging, etc), The Sartorialist fashion blog takes snapshots (let's keep in mind that photography, and fashion photography are a part of the art world) of both unknown and well-known people on the street and has gained much notoriety in fashion by doing so. The idea of a blog like the Sartorialist as a type of street art may be a stretch as it is not a permanent fixture on the street as much of street art can be, but when I was thinking of this, it got me thinking of O’Doherty’s “Inside the White Cube”. These photographs are snapshots of street culture in multiple places and times that collectively serve as an artistic representation of that occurrence, in this case: fashion in the streets. So could this be classified as street art?