They say you can buy anything on the internet. Jon Adams, founder of Artvoyeur, makes accessible even the Lowbrow, Pin-up and Pop Surrealist art of some notoriously underground artists from the West Coast of America.
“We met up with a few of the emerging artists who were coming out at the time [2004]; you've probably heard of Shepard Fairey," Adams says, explaining how be built his impressive collection.
“He was just starting out, and the Obey Giant thing was just taking off. It's become a part of the cooperate monopoly that he rallied against which I think is quite funny. He works for companies for Nike and Sony and companies like that, which is quite amusing. Mind you, it doesn't stop him from maintaining this kind of propaganda position. And from there we were kind of working with a lot of the west coast kind of people, like Robert Williams, the Granddaddy of Low Brow art – he's also the founder and editor of Juxtapoz Magazine.
“It started off as an underground art magazine and it's now the worlds largest circulation art magazine in the world. If you google Robert Williams you will see he actually coined the term Low Brow art. He was working with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth ... have you ever seen Rat Fink? A little green rat? That was Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Lots and lots of people have used Rat Fink as a symbol of the emerging Low Brow scene. In a nutshell, Ed obviously could not work all by himself so he recruited a whole lot of young artists [to do] custom design for Hot Rod and paraphernalia for t-shirts.
“When we started, Low Brow was just an emerging art scene, very much a subculture. And when we first started we were the second or third Low Brow gallery in the world. There are dozens and dozens now, of course. One thing I should point out is that all of the artists' work have appeared in Juxtapoz. They are actually known as Juxtapoz artists .The title of the magazine has almost become synonymous with the actual art movement.”
Jon's extensive involvement in the art movement in the internationally eventually brought him back to his home base in Australia.
“After a stint in the UK we all connected with the emerging artists and we brought back a chunk of their art work back to Australia for a show called New Style Pop Surrealism. Now that was quite a few years back, and that toured around the place. Then we kept on connecting and now... basically I'm selling my entire collection, which is everything on the Artvoyeur website.”
Jon is also proud that Artvoyeur holds the largest collection of Bettie Page portraits signed by the iconic lady herself (“they are absolutely beautiful pieces,” he beams).
“We were fortunate enough to get in touch with Olivia, who's one of the world’s leading pin-up artists. [Betty Page] died about three years ago, but on her eighty second birthday, she signed a number of portraits that Olivia had done of her. Only a handful. And we were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right contacts to secure twenty two of them.”
Jon is somewhat frustrated that most of the sales from Artvoyeur have ended up back on the States. “I think of the last thirty sales, twenty of them were from the US. It's a real bugger because the rates are ridiculous and when we brought them in here it was actually just after 9/11 and security was just insane... we actually had a situation where one of our art works was detained in LA. And they were going to blow it up.”
Fortunately, there isn’t much money can’t fix. $1200 later, the piece was on a plane to Australia. “Funny thing is, the same things are going back to the states with far less security involved.“
To view the collection, head to artvoyeur.org.
