Can popular art be high-brow?
An exhibit of master works by a 19th Century Impressionist master - certainly a high-brow experience. But Claude Monet traveled to Venice because his dealer didn’t think he could sell those water lily paintings he was experimenting with. “No horizon line! Where’s the context? How can I sell these?” Everyone loved images of Venice so, reluctantly, there he went to paint familiar postcard subjects in his signature style. The same subject from slightly varying angles, in different light, sometimes fog, or smog, sometimes dawn or dusk. Even today, among all the Impressionists, Monet’s ephemeral landscapes, in which he’s painting not “a bridge, a house, a boat” but “the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found” - capturing the atmosphere between the subject and him, are recognizable, popular, and don’t require a degree in art history to enjoy.
A few weeks ago I toured the Brooklyn Museum’s very special exhibition* about Monet’s time in Venice, in the context of what was happening in both real and art worlds around them. What I came away with wasn’t so much about the artist, but about how we categorize and homogenize our understanding of art.
The Impressionists, among whom Monet is a towering figure, are widely known for two innovations - of time and place. They were fast - dashing off “impressions” of a scene rather than spending meticulous months refining reality. And they were mobile - carrying their paints and easels to where the landscapes, brothels, cafes and backstage views were, so they could capture momentary action and light.
It turns out, though, that Monet didn’t quite follow this new creative process. Van Gogh, for example, painted something like a 60 major, and recognizable, works in his last 60 days, basically dashing off one a day. Monet, though, came back from ten weeks in Venice with three dozen “sketches” - heavily painted, but unexhibitable, unfinished, and far from masterpieces. It would be three years, after returning to water lilies and exhibiting those with success, before he returned to the memory of Venice by completing these works, making the water shimmer and the air pulsate with atmosphere so that we could experience not just Venice, but Monet’s Venice, which exists somewhere in the space between us and the paintings.
Does the popularity and accessibility of Monet’s paintings, and his success selling them during his lifetime, make them less high-brow? Perhaps what makes Impressionism so attractive to audiences today is that these moments of beauty and real life resonate with our own experience. We don’t require an advanced degree to enjoy them; we allow ourselves to be our own arbiters of taste. And, yet, when we enter a museum, we go first to the text on the wall to better understand what we’re seeing, rather than feeling first and learning about context and the interpretation of others after.
Are Immersive shows low-brow?
A few years ago I went to experience the first “Immersive Van Gogh,” in a warehouse not far from the Bastille, in Paris. As this production and several imitations spread to, and across, the U.S., many of my museum and curator colleagues were up in arms about it taking audiences away from experiencing the “real thing,” the original works. During my Paris visit I ran into a friend whose mother had gone to the same immersive show I had, having never seen a Van Gogh in her life, and was now curious to see and learn more of his work, and was asking which museums had them.
In Dallas the following year, I found myself alone, for most of an hour, in the galleries of the Dallas Museum of Art’s “Van Gogh and the Olive Groves” exhibit, evidently because an Immersive Van Gogh production had similar looking banners around town and at least the tourist audience didn’t know about the other, and quite different, immersion into his world. If only the museum exhibit had come after, would low-brow immersion in Van Gogh’s imagery have led at least some to experience the high-brow immersion into his mind and world?
“Paranormal Activity” has had seven movies, each watched by tens of millions of viewers. Certainly not elitist or privileged entertainment. Now it’s been turned into a stage version, which I saw in London soon after “Monet and Venice.” When the lights went down, they went all the way down. Total blackness. Not momentary. And then this entirely normal drama unfolds, two characters with as yet untold backstories under heightened circumstance. There’s a premonition of darkness, but it lies more in our expectations than what’s said or seen on stage. At first.
My thought, when the normal started to devolve into the extraordinary, the frightening paranormal, is that sitting in the same room with ghosts and demons, no matter how fictional one might choose to believe they are, is a lot scarier than when they’re constrained by a movie or tv screen. The ghosts occupy the space between the subject and us. Just like a Monet landscape, the ephemeral feels more real when it only exists because we’re there to experience it.
A night at the Fort Worth Stock Rodeo. Dickie’s Arena opened in 2019, purpose-built for the rodeo. It’s modern, tech-forward and accommodating, like any modern sports or concert venue, yet designed for what I’ve always thought of, from movies like Nicholas Ray’s “The Lusty Men,” (Robert Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy, with Susan Hayward) between them) to be the most rough and tumble, hard-scrabble, sawdust and sometimes blood flying spectacular entertainment that America has ever produced - a product of our frontier spirit with few rules and fewer who follow them.
Just a few feet above and behind the impeccably dressed and groomed, as if ready for a date, bull-riders waited their turn. I could feel the fear with every practiced motion - stroking the rope, gripping and re-gripping it in their glove, constantly adjusting their mount on the bull. Preparations that pretended control for the minutes, and then seconds, before the gate swung open and the bull took charge, turning it into a question of how long, not whether, the rider can stay on.
Sitting next me was a lifelong rodeo-goer, who wasn’t thrilled with the helmets that the bull riders wore, or the extra safety ropes and “other doodads” that adorned the horses. This was entertainment, no doubt, but it was also very dangerous, and very real. When the bull throws the rider, the full weight of the now freed beast come down inches away from crushing bones and flesh. Or not far enough away.
In case you missed how close the bull came to splattering blood, large screen replays offered up the truth. And then the score. Sports meets spectacle: showbiz.
Can high and low merge into something new?
From these successive events - old world, new world, other worlds - I started to think about the difference between high and low brow entertainment in a new way, perhaps similar to what Marshall McLuhan called “hot” and “cool” media. Hot was high definition - providing so much information that you could experience it passively, reactively; cool media required the audience to participate, to fill in the gaps, activate the mind. High brow - opera, museum exhibits, books - require interpretation, imagination and that’s how they involve us. Low-brow - the rodeo, immersive Van Gogh, and movies - are so full and immediate that our engagement is more visceral - emotional first and then meaningful over time.
But as technology brings movie-like effects to the stage, interpretation and replays to live entertainment, movies emerging from the dark onto our phones, authors reading their books to us with authentic voice, rhythm and intonation, and as artists ask us to occupy the time and space between their work and us, high and low brow cross over with such frequency that we all start to experience the same worlds, in more similar ways. So perhaps there is now only one brow. - Daniel Edelman for The Unibrow, February, 2026
