Is Low the
New High?
By Wendy Cromwell
Photo credit © SACAI
Do you wear canvas high-tops, or are you all about the upmarket leather sneaker? No matter what type you prefer, everyone wears them! The first high-top was a canvas basketball sneaker designed for Chuck Taylor in 1922. Today luxury brands retail sneakers for thousands of dollars, are traded online, and compete at auction. Case in point: in April 2021, a pair of sneakers that Kanye West wore to the Grammys sold for $1.8 million, a world record for sneakers. This is a clear-cut case of “low,” or mass-market consumer goods, entering the “high” market of unique works of art, vintage cars, and fine wine. Clearly, the boundaries between consumer culture and fine art have collapsed. How did we get here? From the Skateboard to the Sneaker The “high-low” dichotomy was officially applied to art in 1990, when MoMA mounted an exhibition called High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture. For the first time in a museum setting, newspaper cartoons, comic books, graffiti, and mass-produced objects from consumer culture were shown side by side with iconic paintings that incorporated “street” sources - think Picasso’s newspaper collages or Lichtenstein’s cartoons. Thirty years later, the show seems to have predicted the evolution of the art market. From Warhol to Koons, Contemporary art that incorporates mass-market imagery tops the charts. Show You the Money • Andy Warhol, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), 1963 - sold for $105 million at Sotheby’s, 2013 • Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986 - sold for $91 million at Christie’s, 2019 72 slmag.net
• Roy Lichtenstein, Nurse, 1964 - sold for $95 million at Christie’s, 2015 • Beeple, EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, 2021 - sold for $69 million at Christie’s, 2021 (Spoiler: this one’s an NFT) Warhol’s Silver Car Crash set the record for any Warhol at auction, ever. The image was taken from a tabloid photo that shows dead people hanging from crumpled metal (pretty dark compared to soup cans). Takeaway: Warhol not only understood our fascination with sensational violence, but he also recognized that media images have the potential to transform the way we see; as such, he used familiar imagery to make art that would reach people. For Warhol, there probably never was a “low” or “high” to begin with. Warhol’s Populist Legacy Warhol was a Populist, similar to Jeff Koons. Pop art lends itself to merchandising, and Koons capitalized on that to reach a wider audience. From the get-go, Koons made “mini” versions of his monumental sculptures that cross over from the “high” world of auctions to the “low” world of the gift shop! His collaborations run the gamut from beach towels to handbags, to a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. So if you can’t afford the sculpture, you can still buy the handbag (art collectors ALSO buy the handbags!). Other artists whose work stems from Pop culture, like Richard Prince, took note of the handbag phenomenon. Missed the drop? You can find your bag on The RealReal or Rebag, fashion’s answer to auctions.
