"Everything You Presume Is Wrong"

A quote from Robert Williams, vanguard of the "lowbrow" art movement.

"When I was the art director for Roth Studios, one of the top-selling T-shirt designs was a cartoon image of a knight in armor, holding a lance with a banner that read: "DO UNTO OTHERS AND THEN SPLIT." The shirt design was a favorite and sold in the thousands. The next logical step in the design was to make an improved version, depicting a new knight image, this time in accurate period-perfect Renaissance armor which stressed the manliness of the figure. This shirt was produced, and the sales proved it to be a flop. The earlier crude design was put back on the market, and to our surprise, the sales once again climbed. What was the charm of the original retarded design? It show how people think in symbols. This was very disappointing to me. I came to see successful art as the consequence of popularism - stupid sells."

This is something I have known for a long time but Mr. Williams has reminded me. To appreciate art requires an educated mind. To simply say, "That looks like a monkey could have painted it," shows ignorance of art and what it's all about. Picasso said, "It took me 4 years to paint like Raphael, but a life time to paint like a child," meaning it takes a lifetime to regain that childlike way of painting. To use the imagination unfettered, uncluttered by years of adult responsibility and maturity. Society educates the creativity out of all of us and we're lucky, as adults, to regain any portion of it back. Robert R. McCammon, author of that great novel "Boy's Life" said, "We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us." This is so true. I battle daily with the constraints of adulthood and it's war against my soul of creativity. I continue to try and approach art with the eyes of a little child. May I be just the tiniest bit successful.
Then again, stupid can be fun sometimes. What do I know?