Pop Art and Popular Culture
Pop Art was essentially an American phenomenon that included European responses to the imagery of the post-war consumer culture pioneered in New York ad agencies. Like Neo-Dada, Pop Art exposed the limits of Modernism and the prevailing discourse on the aesthetics of painting. These two movements supported mixed media, mass media, hybrid objects and anti-art gestures, employing sources from popular culture, low art and advertising. Perhaps more interesting than the art was the new attitude of the artists—irreverent and business-minded, they thumbed their collective noses at the high-minded, humanist based Abstract Expressionism. But the biggest change wrought by the post Ab Ex movements was the return of representation, upending the dominance of abstract art.
Tags: Andy Warhol, Austerity Britain, Beatles, British Pop Art, Comic Books, Commodity Goods, Consumerism, David Bailey, Edouard Manet, Jean Shrimpton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Lawrence Alloway, Marcel Duchamp, Photo Realism, Pop Art, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Readymades, Return to Representation, Richard Hamilton, Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, Rolling Stones, Roy Lichtenstein, The Affluent Society, Tom Wesslemann, Twiggy