I dropped out of school because I just figured I could get more involved in the arts scene.
Because I think a lot of the people that really appreciate art and want to collect art, especially this style.
You're talking about street art. What's really street art? It was more kind of pop culture.
This is a really good time to be an artist, I think, especially in California.
And as the years went by, other people began to realize there was money to be made in this kind of art.
So if I dropped the quality of my technique down and swapped it up a little bit, I would easily fit in with the punk rock art.
Basically, it really came out of underground comics and album cover art.
I feel that there were a number of people that were really kind of the progenitors of the movement.
Robert Williams, of course, being one because he was like the first and most famous, and of course he helped start juxtapose.
My name is Robert Williams. I'm an artist. I live in Los Angeles, California.
I have the distinction of being what's called an underground artist, an alternative artist.
I started as a commercial illustrator, mostly working in the record industry in LA.
I'm what they call a low-brow and pop surrealist artist, and I've been on the art scene for a long time. It's the 80s, and this is one of the most talented generations of artists that I've seen.
It's new, and it's exciting, and it's sort of what's going on, and I think back to during the era of the Jackson Pollux, for instance,
it would have been great to have been around that when they were young and starving.
I had gone to art shows from where I'm at at the Orange County Museum of Art, what was called the Newport Barbara Art Museum,
and I'd go there and all the people looked like, you know, the youngest person there was like 65 to like 90,
and then if you were there, it was kind of like, you know, it was whispering and quiet.
And low-brow art seemed to really kind of come into public consciousness in the early 90s.
I don't like the term low-brow because I don't think that art needs to be defined in opposition to something else that could be high-brow.
Are you going to use low-brow? I mean, that's already the name of a movement, but I think it's so limiting to what the movement offers.
Fine art establishment would prefer we all just went away and made toys, and I'd like to be a person who's, you know,
really battling it out to be in the Whitney Biennial.
And as the years went by, other people began to realize there was money to be made in this kind of art,
and so different galleries opened up.
And now the people that are buying the other crap are starting to realize that they really can buy what they like
instead of what has been curated down to them from art consultants, art curators and stuff like that.
And this will be looked back on some day as, well, you know, we could have bought that stuff and been part of that a lot earlier on.
I didn't really think that was a good term for the movement because it wasn't really a low-brow art movement.
To me, it never really was. What it really was was a new-brow art movement because what it really was was new thinking in the art world.
Pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.
