Don’t know if any of you folks are regular readers of Boing Boing, an excellent blog devoted to all kinds of interesting stuff, whose writers are champions of viral curiosities, sci-fi, the tech savvy, steampunk, all things DRM-free, and other things not mentioned here, but I am. I’ve been pretty intrigued by their art links before. I’ve noticed that there is a very specific but broad-ranging type of art being presented. Common to most of it is that it’s very easy to grasp on a surface level (i.e., you could explain it in a couple of words if you had to), usually involves quite a bit of technical facility, and is often at least vaguely rooted in a pop kind of sensibility (or, if you must, is “kitsch-embracing”). The reason for this, at least in part, is that this art is very democratic–it is refreshingly unaloof to people with little to no artistic training. That’s my take anyway. What do y’all think? (The link will take you to their archive of posts with an ‘art’ tag.)
Joking around with Melanie, I sometime use the term “coffee shop art” to describe things that meet exactly the description you use for a lot of the art that boing boing posts ( and http://www.drawn.ca and http://www.thecoolhunter.net/art/). Probably in reality the joke’s on me–there really is more momentum going for this ‘democratic’ art than for what I do.
I will say in my own half-hearted hierarchies, I do put coffee shop art slightly up ‘furniture boutique art’ and ‘Jesse Hall art’ (referring to the piles WPA-lite painting that cover the walls of the Administration Building here on the MU Campus.