Existing comment:
Pop Art:
The distinction between high and low forms of art had been breaking down throughout the 20th century, but in the 1960s, there was a broader acceptance of art's proximity to commercial art and its affinity with popular culture. High art, it was thought, no longer demanded ethical posturing or existential angst, but could be simply a professional distinction. Many Pop artists were in fact trained as commercial artists. A decade earlier, the United States had become the greatest exporter of consumer objects as well as cultural ephemera, and so Pop Art, like Abstract Expressionism, became strongly associated with American identity.
Bright colors, flat images, hard surfaces, and strikingly simple compositions relate these paintings to the traditional of modern, abstract painting. Artists had also been using text, ephemera, and readymade objects as early as the 1910s. Work referred to as Pop is unified by its ironic embrace of the mediated images found in advertising, pornography, movies, and comic books. In addition to adopting the look of mass-produced objects, Pop artists often employed techniques of mass production. Andy Warhol, for instance, used silk screens to reproduce paintings as an assembly line set up in his studio, which was known as The Factory. |