What is conté?
Conté is a vivid, waxy crayon invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. Artists use Conté crayons for detailed drawing, shading large areas, and blending colors. The tips can be sharpened with sanding pads for precision, or the sides can be dragged flat for broad shading.
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Street Art is artwork created and executed in public spaces, outside of traditional art venues. It gained popularity during the 1980s graffiti art boom and has since evolved into various forms and styles. Common forms of Street Art include pop-up art, sticker art, stencil graffiti, and street installations or sculptures. Terms like guerrilla art, neo-graffiti, post-graffiti, and urban art are often used interchangeably to describe this genre, which challenges conventional ideas about where and how art should be displayed.
Lowbrow is a derogatory term that refers to certain forms of popular culture. It describes an art movement that began in Los Angeles in the 1970s. The term lowbrow originally refers to a person with little intellectual or refined taste. The Lowbrow art movement, also known as Pop Surrealism, blends elements of underground comics, punk music, hot rod culture, and other subcultures, often with a sense of humor and irony.
Entropy, in a broader sense, refers to the inevitable deterioration or decline of a society or system. In art, the concept was popularized by artist Robert Smithson in the 1960s. He used the term to critique what he saw as the static and overly simplified nature of contemporary minimalist art. Smithson's work often explored the idea of entropy as a force of chaos and decay, contrasting with the perceived order and purity of minimalist works.