Pop Art
Pop Art was a movement that gained ground in America, specifically New York, in the 1960s. The style of Pop Art is characterized by the use of images from mass popular culture such as advertisements, news, magazines, comic books, and household objects, making note of the omnipresent nature of mass culture. It is the marriage of popular culture and fine art, subsequently blurring the lines between high and low brow. Often concerned with the widespread materialism and consumerism of post WWII America, Pop artists employed images seen in everyday American life.
Consumerism and Mass Culture
Andy Warhol is perhaps one of the most celebrated and well-known American Artists. His fame is due in part to his use of extremely recognizable images which to this day are synonymous with his name. Warhol had experience in commercial art, doing magazine illustration and advertising art before he began exhibiting his work. It was in the sixties that Warhol would begin his tradition of using images of iconic American products and celebrities in his pieces, often addressing the subject of consumerism. Just like products they showed, Warhol believed that his works could be mass produced. [1] He accomplished this in his aptly named studio, the Factory, by making thousands of prints which were also appropriately made by machine, as he worked mainly with screen printing machines.
Warhol had this to say regarding the use of brand name products in his art,
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.
You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you
can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. [2]
His unabashed display of consumer products led some critics to try to discredit his embrace of the market culture believing it had no place in art, and claimed that he was "selling out" to commercialism and capitalism. [3] Warhol's work, however, marks a profound shift in the art world where art and mass culture collide and where the questions "what is art?" and "who is art for?" were raised. In his 1964 New York exhibit entitled The American Supermarket, Warhol debuted his print of a Campbell's Soup can, as well as one of Coke bottles and a recreation Brillo box.
Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Warhol would also turn images of celebrities and public figures into iconic and unforgettable images, turning them, in a way, into consumer products themselves. His representations of Marilyn Monroe are some of the most recognizable images on the planet, but he also made use of famous and controversial political figures. His portraits of Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon play with the idea of what a celebrity is, and undoubtedly offer political commentary, as evidenced by the words "vote McGovern" under Nixon's face.
Work Cited
1. "The Art of Andy Warhol," accessed November 18, 2011, http://i-am-db-cooper.hubpages.com/hub/The-Art-of-Andy-Warhol
2. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1975, 101.
3. "The Art of Andy Warhol," http://i-am-db-cooper.hubpages.com/hub/The-Art-of-Andy-Warhol
1. "The Art of Andy Warhol," accessed November 18, 2011, http://i-am-db-cooper.hubpages.com/hub/The-Art-of-Andy-Warhol
2. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1975, 101.
3. "The Art of Andy Warhol," http://i-am-db-cooper.hubpages.com/hub/The-Art-of-Andy-Warhol