Traffic magazine has an interview with Technoccult pal Kirsten Anderson about the “pop surrealism” movement.
Now Pop Surrealism – did I explain to you why the book is called Pop Surrealism? When I decided that I wanted to do a survey of this art genre, a big chunk of the artists didn’t want to be in a book called Lowbrow Art because they felt it was it would be misconstrued as being insulting, and that it implied a lack of sophistication or skill. . . . They thought it just sort of sounded like a downgrade term, and that it didn’t really capture the spirit of the work anymore.
So that meant that I had to come up with another title for the book, which was incredibly stressful because who am I to say what this is genre is going be called?
[…]
So I spent six months talking with everybody from Robert Williams to Billy Shire (who owns the La Luz De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles) . . . and asked them what they thought it should be called. No one really wanted to go there. And I wrote up lists of, you know, fake movement names. Something that could encapsulate everything. And I couldn’t come up with anything. But there had been this term floating around called Pop Surrealism [and] . . . that . . . was the one term that everyone felt okay about. And I notice it’s being used pretty extensively.
Full Story: Traffic Magazine: Kirsten Anderson
