HIGH ART
LOW ART
IS THERE ANY DISTINCTION AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN ONE ADOPTS THE FORMS OF THE OTHER?
(https://i.imgur.com/7Ff3RmA.png?2)
For thousands of years, art was the preserve of kings and emperors and the only suitable subjects of art were the only things that stood above kings and emperors: god(s) and the heavens.
Kings and emperors sometimes featured in the art, but only to show their relation to and humble servitude of the gods*. The Renaissance relaxed the rules to include the obscenely wealthy, but it was the late-19th century before the mundane was considered a suitable subject for Art.
The value system flipped** and now the only art that deals with gods and their ways is the low sort. Defoe's literally about a god, Brink's Melancholema and Chronozon are gods (real or not), and Cade and the Sisters are either gods or their opposites.
Lichtenstein and Warhol put commercial art and pop culture in the academy, so comics occupied the abandoned high ground. But comic creators, omnivores that they are, can't let Proper Art go. As well as the examples above, last week's episode of Defoe saw SK Moore come all over Leonardo (https://i.imgur.com/ytFnASo.jpg).
Comics have inherited art's former fixation on the elevated, whether that's gods or the privileged forms of high art, although 2000ad probably has as many fans as Bacon and Kahlo did in their lifetimes. Broxton quoting Bacon is especially interesting, given that work's history of inspiring low art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet) that became high art ***
* Except when the kings and emperors decided they were gods, in which case they would commission the creation of monumental works of art that desperately tried to convince the viewer that this act of self-deification was anything more than mental illness or the same social isolation that means nobody dares tell Mark Zuckerberg he needs to change the way he gets his hair cut.
** When the wealthy decided God was dead, the value system flipped and now the lowly are deified. The Art world is falling over itself to work a Grenfell (http://www.grenfelltower.memorial/) angle into every exhibit and wealthy patrons are trying to live forever by coopting the exercise and dietary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet) habits of peasants.
*** If Alien hasn't quite yet joined Nosferatu (an unlicensed pulp knock-off!) and the works of Hitchcock on the leger of schlock subsequently revaluated as high art, it's only the death of its director away from doing so