Pop Art and the Contest Over American Culture examines the socially and aesthetically subversive character of pop art. Providing a historically contextualized reading of American pop art, Sara Doris locates the movement within the larger framework of the social, cultural, and political transformations of the 1960s. She demonstrates how pop art's use of discredited mass-cultural imagery worked to challenge established social and cultural hierarchies.
When Pop Art paintings depicted Campbell soup cans or comic-book scenes of teen romance, did they stoop to the level of their mundane sources, or did they instead transform the detritus of consumer culture into high art? In this study, Ccile Whiting declares this issue fundamentally irresolvable and instead takes the question itself, along with the varied answers it has generated, as the object of her analysis. Whiting presents case studies that focus on works by four artists - Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Marisol Escobar - who are closely associated with the Pop Art movement. Throughout her engaging analyses, Whiting unravels the gendered overtones of their cultural manoeuvrings, noting how the connotations of masculinity as attached to the seriousness of high art, and the presumed frivolity and caprice of a feminine world of consumption repositioned cultural frontiers and reformulated the relation between sexes.
The techniques utilized, however, varied: the Americans generally used a more reductive method, arriving at a centralized iconic image, while the British preferred an episodic approach that generated an implied narrative. As the essays in this book make clear, Pop Art promoted no specific agenda beyond the investigation of the prevailing American environment."--BOOK JACKET.
In countries around the world, the rise of class divisions and unbridled capitalism are changing the conventional definitions of art and esthetics. Historically, the philanthropy of the elite has played a leading role in supporting, funding, and distributing artistic works. While such measures may be pure in intent, many worry that private funding may be gentrifying the arts and creating a situation in which art will only be valued for its prestige or, worse, its price tag. This collection of essays examines the current movement to democratize the arts and make the world of artistic endeavor open and accessible to all. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
This book explores Andy Warhol’s creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, as neoliberalism perpetuated the idea that fixed classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol’s work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically “American” or “middle class.” Drawing on archival and theoretical research into Warhol’s contemporary cultural milieu, Grudin demonstrates that these features of Warhol’s work were in fact closely associated with the American working class. The emergent technologies Warhol conspicuously employed to make his work—home projectors, tape recorders, film and still cameras—were advertised directly to the working class as new opportunities for cultural participation. What’s more, some of Warhol’s most iconic subjects—Campbell’s soup, Brillo pads, Coca-Cola—were similarly targeted, since working-class Americans, under threat from a variety of directions, were thought to desire the security and confidence offered by national brands. Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol’s work disseminated these promises, while also providing a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.
Pop art was essential to the Americanization of global art in the 1960s, yet it engendered resistance and adaptation abroad in equal measure, especially in Paris. From the end of the Algerian War of Independence and the opening of Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery for American Pop art in Paris in 1962, to the silkscreen poster workshops of May ’68, this book examines critical adaptations of Pop motifs and pictorial devices across French painting, graphic design, cinema and protest aesthetics. Liam Considine argues that the transatlantic dispersion of Pop art gave rise to a new politics of the image that challenged Americanization and prefigured the critiques and contradictions of May ’68.
Analyzing complex social and political issues through their manifestations in popular culture, this book provides readers a strong foundational knowledge of the 1960s as a decade. 1969 went out in a way that could never have been imagined in 1960. While the president at the end of the decade had been vice president at the start, the intervening years permanently changed American culture. Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties explores the cultural and social framework of the 1960s, addressing film, television, sports, technology, media/advertising, fashion, art, and more. Entries are presented in encyclopedic fashion, organized into such categories as controversies in pop culture, game changers, technology, and the decade's legacy. A timeline highlights significant cultural moments, while an introduction and a conclusion place those moments within the contexts of preceding and subsequent decades. Attention to the decade's most prominent influencers allows readers to understand the movements with which these figures are associated, and discussion of controversies and social change enables readers to gain a stronger understanding of evolving American social values.
In this age of insta-stardom and selfies, Pop Art still defines the world we live in. Emerging in the 1950s, Pop Art arrived in an explosion of colour, offering bold representations and plenty of humour. All of the celebrities, events and politics that came to define two turbulent decades are encapsulated in their work. Pop Art challenged the establishment and offered a new modernism, blurring the line between art and mass production. Uncover 100 stories in this essential guide to a groundbreaking movement. Enjoy enlightening critiques of iconic works; meet key figures including Warhol and Hockney; and discover inspirational ideas and novel new methods.
This book offers the first in-depth analysis of the relationship between art and design, which led to the creation of 'pop'. Challenging accepted boundaries and definitions, the authors seek out various commonalities and points of connection between these two exciting areas. Confronting the all-pervasive 'high art / low culture' divide, Pop Art and Design brings a fresh understanding of visual culture during the vibrant 1950s and 60s. This was an era when commercial art became graphic design, illustration was superseded by photography and high fashion became street fashion, all against the backdrop of a rapidly-evolving economic and political landscape, a glamorous youth scene and an effervescent popular culture. The book's central argument is that pop art relied on and drew inspiration from pop design, and vice versa. Massey and Seago assert that this relationship was articulated through the artwork, design, publications and exhibitions of a network of key practitioners. Pop Art and Design provides a case study in the broader inter-relationship between art and design, and constitutes the first interdisciplinary publication on the subject.
