The document discusses postmodernism in art, specifically focusing on pop art and its relationship to consumer culture. It introduces Andy Warhol's Brillo Box from 1969 and discusses how pop art challenged previous definitions of art by appropriating images and objects from popular culture and mass media. The emergence of pop art coincided with the increasing commercialization of the art world. Theorists like Arthur Danto and Jean Baudrillard explored how pop art blurred the lines between art and everyday objects through the use of symbols and simulations.
Is a picture worth 1,000 words? Textual AnalysisDeborahJ
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This lecture will introduce semiotics or the semiology of art, a mechanism for deriving meaning that is considered to a more inclusive development of Panofskyâs Iconography
Is a picture worth 1,000 words? Textual AnalysisDeborahJ
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This lecture will introduce semiotics or the semiology of art, a mechanism for deriving meaning that is considered to a more inclusive development of Panofskyâs Iconography
When is art now? This lecture will focus on definitions of Contemporary Art that focus on the experience of 'time', comparing and contrasting them with theories of contemporary art that hold it to be a (sub)culture, a genre, a period, or a style.
What does it mean to state that art is contemporary rather than to hold that it is modern, prescient, traditional, nostalgic, postmodern, ancient...?
What concepts of time do people need to develop and share in order to understand the contemporary?
Where and how is the temporality of the contemporary situated?
This lecture will outline some of the key ways in which art theory has attempted to approach such questions by introducing a few key concepts such as: supercessionism, presentism, contemporaneity, anachrony, polychrony and chronopolitics.
To illustrate how this works in practice, the lecture will examine the chronopolitics of the 2012 Documenta and 2013 Venice Biennale.
When is art now? This lecture will focus on definitions of Contemporary Art that focus on the experience of 'time', comparing and contrasting them with theories of contemporary art that hold it to be a (sub)culture, a genre, a period, or a style.
What does it mean to state that art is contemporary rather than to hold that it is modern, prescient, traditional, nostalgic, postmodern, ancient...?
What concepts of time do people need to develop and share in order to understand the contemporary?
Where and how is the temporality of the contemporary situated?
This lecture will outline some of the key ways in which art theory has attempted to approach such questions by introducing a few key concepts such as: supercessionism, presentism, contemporaneity, anachrony, polychrony and chronopolitics.
To illustrate how this works in practice, the lecture will examine the chronopolitics of the 2012 Documenta and 2013 Venice Biennale.
This lecture looks at Determinism and Technological Determinism. This lecture is part of the Media and Cultural Theories module on the MSc and MA in Creative Technology and Creative Games at The University of Salford.
Du design au design numĂŠrique, v.2 : petites inquiĂŠtudes thĂŠoriques #didn2StĂŠphane Vial
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ConfĂŠrence prononcĂŠe le 12 mai 2011 au festival SIANA Ă Evry, dans le cadre du colloque "L'imaginaire des technologies", lors de la matinĂŠe "Comment le design d'interaction change notre rapport aux machines ?"
'Bad' Painting and the work of Anton HenningJames Clegg
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This lecture users the theme of taste to explore the subject of postmodernism, building to a consideration of 'Bad' Painting and the work of German artist Anton Henning. By James Clegg
How Art Works: Week 5 The Rise of the ismsDeborahJ
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This lecture will:
Examine how artists sought to find a language that would adequately express the changes and disruptions associated with modern life
Attempt to capture the dialectical relationship between each movement and its predecessors
Make connections between historical events and art genres
Encouraged you to think of styles as useful tools for exploration and analysis, rather than as hard and fast academic definitions, and to relate to the art itself rather than to a merely conceptual idea
The power of the image: Contemporary art, gender, and the politics of perceptionDeborahJ
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The relation between visual representations and the identity of the human subject.
The ideas and research that have informed this lecture are grounded in the areas of queer theory, gender studies, critical race theory, and feminist studies.
The global image. from consumer culture to the digital revolution DeborahJ
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The Global Image: From Consumer Culture to the Digital Revolution is focused on the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history.
Beyond the visual: The Body in Contemporary ArtDeborahJ
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When we think of the Body in Contemporary Art we could consider a number of different and relevant aspects. For instance, the body - the human form - is central in art, traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality and so on. But in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art across a range of media, from painting and sculpture to installation, photography, video art, performance and participatory art. By considering the different roles played by the body in art, we can identify that there has been a shift from being the subject, for example, in a portraiture, to becoming an active presence in live and participatory events. Alongside this there has also been a significant transformation of the role of the audience, broadly speaking, from passive viewer to active participant.
This presentation crutinises how art practitioners are navigating the artworld, which in our contemporary, late capitalist society is arguably, increasingly regulated by free market conditions, managed in the artworld by the same bureaucrats, curators, dealers and gallery owners, roles that have encroached on the career of artists themselves.
Debates around the idea that the interrelation or the interaction between artwork and viewers has been modified with the practice of Relational Aesthetics.
How Art Works: Week 1 The âunruly disciplineâ DeborahJ
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This lecture will:
introduce ways to think about art and its history and help you to understand how art historians go about their practice
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look at some of the issues and debates that make up the disciple of Art History
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offer some reconsiderations of art history
consider the importance of the gallery and museum
Aims of todays lecture:
To analyse the conditions in which contemporary art is produced
To (re) evaluate your function as an artist within a broad context
Address making a living in the current climate of instability and enforced austerity
Consider issues of free labour, particularly internships, in the cultural sector
What Should be the Christian View of Anime?Joe Muraguri
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We will learn what Anime is and see what a Christian should consider before watching anime movies? We will also learn a little bit of Shintoism religion and hentai (the craze of internet pornography today).
The Chakra System in our body - A Portal to Interdimensional Consciousness.pptxBharat Technology
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each chakra is studied in greater detail, several steps have been included to
strengthen your personal intention to open each chakra more fully. These are designed
to draw forth the highest benefit for your spiritual growth.
In Jude 17-23 Jude shifts from piling up examples of false teachers from the Old Testament to a series of practical exhortations that flow from apostolic instruction. He preserves for us what may well have been part of the apostolic catechism for the first generation of Christ-followers. In these instructions Jude exhorts the believer to deal with 3 different groups of people: scoffers who are "devoid of the Spirit", believers who have come under the influence of scoffers and believers who are so entrenched in false teaching that they need rescue and pose some real spiritual risk for the rescuer. In all of this Jude emphasizes Jesus' call to rescue straying sheep, leaving the 99 safely behind and pursuing the 1.
The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, and is the first book of the Deuteronomistic history, the story of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian exile.
The PBHP DYC ~ Reflections on The Dhamma (English).pptxOH TEIK BIN
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A PowerPoint Presentation based on the Dhamma Reflections for the PBHP DYC for the years 1993 â 2012. To motivate and inspire DYC members to keep on practicing the Dhamma and to do the meritorious deed of Dhammaduta work.
The texts are in English.
For the Video with audio narration, comments and texts in English, please check out the Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF2g_43NEa0
The Good News, newsletter for June 2024 is hereNoHo FUMC
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Our monthly newsletter is available to read online. We hope you will join us each Sunday in person for our worship service. Make sure to subscribe and follow us on YouTube and social media.
Homily: The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity Sunday 2024.docxJames Knipper
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Countless volumes have been written trying to explain the mystery of three persons in one true God, leaving us to resort to metaphors such as the three-leaf clover to try to comprehend the Divinity. Many of us grew up with the quintessential pyramidal Trinity structure of God at the top and Son and Spirit in opposite corners. But what if we looked at this âmysteryâ from a different perspective? What if we shifted our language of God as a being towards the concept of God as love? What if we focused more on the relationship within the Trinity versus the persons of the Trinity? What if stopped looking at God as a nounâŚand instead considered God as a verb? Check it outâŚ
Lesson 9 - Resisting Temptation Along the Way.pptxCelso Napoleon
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Lesson 9 - Resisting Temptation Along the Way
SBs â Sunday Bible School
Adult Bible Lessons 2nd quarter 2024 CPAD
MAGAZINE: THE CAREER THAT IS PROPOSED TO US: The Path of Salvation, Holiness and Perseverance to Reach Heaven
Commentator: Pastor Osiel Gomes
Presentation: Missionary Celso Napoleon
Renewed in Grace
3. âWhat Warholâs dictum [that anything could be art] amounted to was that you cannot tell when something is a work of art just by looking at it, for there is no particular way that art has to look. The upshot was that you could not teach the meaning of art by examples.â (Danto 1992, p.5)
4. The conditions that brought Pop Art into being An art world increasingly driven by corporate money and marketing The intertwined and interdependent relations of fashion, mass media, the entertainment industries, and whatever passes for elite culture, makes any attempt at discrimination between genres or practices, to say nothing of critical judgment, extremely difficult. At the end of the 1930s, Clement Greenbergâs formulism had taught that to protect itself, its quality, or its purity from the kitsch, art had to turn on its own constitutive forms, forms that would become the sole object of theory.
5. Arthur Danto Beyond the Brillo Box: The philosophical revolution in art:You canât tell art just by looking The revolution Danto is talking about is that the difference between art and non-art is no longer visible (even though it is still there). Modernism made the revolution possible, by erasing old standards (Warholâs soup cans wouldnât have been possible in the 19th century)
6. Question: How could Brillo Box be art? Dantoâs first thoughts Previous standards must have been erased (by modernism) There must be a theory that would let you count it as art (âan enfranchising theoryâ). In other words, people in the art world must at least be able to have a discussion, and be able to give reasons why such a thing should count as art, and some number of them must be persuaded by the reasons.
7. How could Brillo Box be art? Dantoâs later thoughts Dantoâs two theses: Brillo Box (and things like it) are examples of art as philosophy. When art becomes philosophy, art history is over.
8. The End of Art? âArt was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narrative. The narrative had come to an end... [This], in fact, was a liberating idea, or I thought it could be. It liberated artists from the task of making more history. It liberated artists from having to follow the âcorrect historical lineââ (Danto 1992, p.10)
9.
10.
11. Peter Blake (1961) Self-Portrait With Badges Eduardo Paolozzi (1970) Hollywood Wax Museum
12. Pop in Britain: The Independent Group Richard Hamilton. Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? 1956Collage
13. âTopicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word, which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.â Lawrence Alloway (1958) The Arts and the Mass Media
15. Pop Art âModernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass cultureâ (Huyssen 1986, p.vii) Eduardo Paolozzi, BUNK! (1971)
35. Your mind loses the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, and begins to engage with the latter without understanding what it is doing.
36.
37. assumes and negates both the inherited European system of High Art, the New York Abstract Expressionist movement and its corollary, Colour Field Painting, and the emerging Minimalist movement
50. The art world today reflects many of the ideas, methods and materials initiated by the Pop Art movement. In Untitled, 1991, Barbara Kruger uses the iconography of the American flag and hard edge graphics to pose a series of provocative questions about American cultural values. Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1991 Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, NY In Rabbit, 1986, artist Jeff Koons cast a mass-produced inflatable Easter bunny in highly polished stainless steel. The sculpture became iconic of art in the 1980s. Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986, ďŁ Jeff Koons
51. ââŚthe art world is becoming allied with the entertainment industry in both ethos and conduct; there is a growing inability to discriminate between knowledge and information; the intellectual strategies of the avant garde have been supplanted by socially irrelevant and sensationalist shock tactics; the perpetual claims for the right of âfreedom of expressionâ concealed new politically correct strictures on criticism; matters of taste have become matters of opinion, any form of judgement or evaluation; moral or aesthetic, is now offensive and derided as hopelessly anachronistic; contemporary art is collaborating with the media in turning a critical discerning public into a passive consuming mass.â Vickery, Jonathan. Art without Administration; Radical Art and Critique after the Neo-avant-Garde, Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 4, Routledge, UK, 2002, p401
52. Pop culture involved a shift in attitudes towards the object. Objects are no longer unique. We know that most of the things we use are made in identical thousands, each indistinguishable from the rest. There was a growing tendency to value things, not for their own sake but in terms of the job they could perform, art felt the effect of this attitude. Nixon/ Khrushchev âKitchen Debateâ (1959)
53.
54. Commodity culture and consumer societies are dependent upon the constant production and consumption of goods in order to function.
55. Advertising images are central to the construction of cultural ideas about lifestyle, self-image, self-improvement, and glamour
56.
57.
58. Danto, Arthur C (1992) Beyond the Brillo Box: The visual arts in post-historical perspective. London, University of California Press.
59. Danto, Arthur C (1997). âAfter The End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of Historyâ, Princeton University Press.
61. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism, London, MacMillan Press LTD.
Editor's Notes
âWhat Warholâs dictum [that anything could be art] amounted to was that you cannot tell when something is a work of art just by looking at it, for there is no particular way that art has to look. The upshot was that you could not teach the meaning of art by examples.â
An art world increasingly driven by corporate money and marketing The intertwined and interdependent relations of fashion, mass media, the entertainment industries, and whatever passes for elite culture, makes any attempt at discrimination between genres or practices, to say nothing of critical judgment, extremely difficult.At the end of the 1930s, Clement Greenbergâs formulism had taught that to protect itself, its quality, or its purity from the kitsch, art had to turn on its own constitutive forms, forms that would become the sole object of theory. Confronted with a shattering of stylistic tendencies and a global proliferation of art scenes, and inheriting a scepticism about all universal judgments and a market-driven environment .Pop Art was a reaction against abstract painting, which pop artists considered as too sophisticated and elite. Pop artists' favorite images were objects from everyday's life like soup cans for Andy Warhol or comics for Roy Lichtenstein. Typical for the attitude of the Pop Art movement was Andy Warhol's use of serigraphy, a photo-realistic, mass-production technique of printmaking. Pop Art intruded into the media and advertising. The differences between The fine arts and commercial arts were voluntarily torn down. An excellent example are the designs of music album covers in the sixties. The undoubted cult figure of Pop Art was Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Other great names are Jaspar Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, Roy LichtensteinâŚThe Pop Art movement was mainly an American and British art movement.
The philosophical revolution in art:You canât tell art just by lookingThe revolution Danto is talking about is that the difference between art and non-art is no longer visible (even though it is still there). Modernism made the revolution possible, by erasing old standards (Warholâs soup cans wouldnât have been possible in the 19th century)Breaking down social boundaries (e.g., gender & class)Breaking down the boundary between High Art and popular culture (e.g., Pop Art, Warhol). âThe transfiguration of the commonplaceâMaking a new kind of museum (a more popular institution, with sales)And (Dantoâs real subject) a philosophical revolution.
Previous standards must have been erased (by modernism)There must be a theory that would let you count it as art (âan enfranchising theoryâ). In other words, people in the art world must at least be able to have a discussion, and be able to give reasons why such a thing should count as art, and some number of them must be persuaded by the reasons.
Background: what Danto thinks Philosophy is:The job of philosophy is âto draw the boundary lines which divide the universe into the most fundamental kinds of things that exist.âA good philosophical method: find two things that you think are fundamentally different (like dreams and waking experience), yet they appear to be the same. Find out what makes them different.Brillo Box is a perfect philosophical example. It looks just like a carton of Brillo boxes, but in fact it is an art work.The difference is not the materials. It is wood, not cardboard like the real thing; but Brillo pads could just as well be shipped in wood containers. The difference must be conceptual, not visible. The work raises a philosophical question about the difference between art and non-art.
âArt was no longer possible in terms of a progressive historical narrative. The narrative had come to an end... [This], in fact, was a liberating idea, or I thought it could be. It liberated artists from the task of making more history. It liberated artists from having to follow the âcorrect historical lineââ (Danto 1992, p.10)
Danto was against the delimitation of art practice and advocated a relativist position in response to the emergence of the everyday in artistic practices (which had been excluded so forcefully by Greenbergian formalist criticism). His enquiry was ontological and concerned the definition of art and pivoted on what he saw as the break in art production set in motion by Andy Warhol. He argued that if Warholâs âBrillo Boxesâ, cannot be visually distinguished from actual Brillo boxes then it follows that art cannot be defined in terms of its visual distinctiveness, and must be instead characterised philosophically.See DANTO, ARTHUR C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: a Philosophy of Art(Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard University Press), 1981
The Pop Art movement originated in England in the 1950s and traveled overseas to the United States during the 1960s. Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, both members of the Independent Group, pioneered the movement in London in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the movement was carried by Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and Peter Phillips. In the early sixties, Pop art found its way to the United States, seen in the work of Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. It developed in the United States as a response to the wealth of the post World War II era and the growing materialism and consumerism in society. The most recognized Pop Artist, Andy Warhol, used a photo-realistic, mass production printmaking technique called seriagraphy to produce his commentaries on media, fame, and advertising. Pop Art made commentary on contemporary society and culture, particularly consumerism, by using popular images and icons and incorporating and re-defining them in the art world. Often subjects were derived from advertising and product packaging, celebrities, and comic strips. The images are presented with a combination of humor, criticism and irony. In doing this, the movement put art into terms of everyday, contemporary life. It also helped to decrease the gap between "high art" and "low art" and eliminated the distinction between fine art and commercial art methods.Arthur C. Danto argues that Andy Warhol's Brillo Box of 1964 brought the established trajectory of Westen art to an end and gave rise to a pluralism which has changed the way art is made, perceived, and exhibited.
The term Pop Art was first used by the British critic Lawrence Alloway in 1954 as a convenient label for the âpopular artâ being created by and influenced by mass media and mass culture. He extended the term in 1962 to include the activity of artists who were trying to use the popular image in the context of âfine artâ.The first truly Pop Art work made in Britain is generally accepted to be Richard Hamiltonâs Just What Is It That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing? A collage made in 1956
âTopicality and a rapid rate of change are not academic in any usual sense of the word, which means a system that is static, rigid, self-perpetuating. Sensitiveness to the variables of our life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.â
Initially Pop Art was more of an underground scene and when it emerged it was met with some resistance.
In some respects this is due to its forerunner, modernism:âModernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass cultureâ
âKitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates ... Insensitivity. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times [...] Formal culture has always belonged to the [powerful and cultivated]; while the [great mass of the exploited and poor] have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.â
In the USA Pop Art grew out of Abstract Art with many American Pop Artists citing Willem de Kooning as a major influence in their work.Also in the USA as it emerged it was the ideal instrument for coming to terms with the American urban environment.
Pop Art was a highly self-conscious movement.It was concerned with what we could call the archeology of mass-produced myths and of popular design.
Pop Art can also be seen to be generically style-less and so when we talk about it we are not talking about a coherent movement as such.In saying that the overriding continuity in terms of Pop Artists activities can be recognised as trying to make sense of the environment.Like practically everything else in our society pop culture was the product of the Industrial Revolution and of the series of technological revolutions that succeeded it.
â[Reality, the Real,] no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all.ââIt is no longer a question of imitation, nor reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double... A perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all is vicissitudes.â (Baudrillard [1983] 2001, p.170)
Baudrillard wrote of the Third-order simulation (where the copy replaces the original): For example Disneyland exists to cover up the fact that it is all of ârealâ America that is Disneyland. Disneyland is presented as imaginary so that we will think that the rest of the country is real, when actually the rest of America is no longer real but made up of simulation and the hyperreal. There is no longer a question of false representation of reality, but of hiding the fact that the real is no longer real.Disneyland is supposed to make its visitors believe that adults and the ârealâ world are elsewhere. He talks about how what we know as reality now is actually a simulation of reality. âDisneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.âThe imaginary world is what is supposed to make it successful, but it is made successful through its miniaturized social representation of ârealâ America.
ForBaudrillard Pop Art constituted a turning point in the history of art whereby art becomes simply the reproduction of signs of the world and in particular the signs of consumer society which itself is primarily a system of signs. Pop Art therefore represents for Baudrillard the triumph of the sign over its referent, the end of representational art, the beginning of a new form of art that he termed âsimulationâ. From his perspective, art became a mere simulation of the images and objects of the contemporary world. Baudrillard also insisted that it was wrong to criticise Pop Art for its naĂŻve Americanism, for its crass commercialism, for its flatness and banality, because these are the very characteristics whereby Pop Art reproduces the very logic of contemporary culture.
Baudrillard interprets Pop Art as emblematic of sign culture, of the reduction of culture to a system of signs within which art often plays a privileged role. Art is subject to the same rules and system of signification as other commodities and follows as well the codes of fashion, determination of value by the market and commodification, thus subverting its critical vocation.Pop Art for Baudrillard illustrate the ways that simulacra came to replicate reality and the process whereby it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between simulacra and reality, in which hyperreal models came to dominate and determine art and social life. These theories of art as simulation and hyperreality developed in studies in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, collected in the volumes on Simulations (1983) and Simulations and Simulacra (194), came to influence new movements in the art world. His theories of stages of representation and simulacra were applied to art history and his analysis of simulations to art works. In particular, the trend of simulation art seemed to embody his theory of simulations, while hyperrealist art movements illustrated his theory of hyperreaity.
In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle.In art this can be seen as an attempt to simulate art, to replicate and mix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more images and artistic objects. This eclecticism of forms and pleasures produces a situation in which art is no longer art in classical or modernist senses but is merely image, artifact, object, simulation, or commodity.
Pop Art attempted to cancel the older, inherited "grand tradition" of European art (and prior American art based on European traditions) to clear the way for something modern, American, and a way of embodying a new concept or philosophy of art-making and even what art is or should be in the current moment assumes and negates both the inherited European system of High Art, the New York Abstract Expressionist movement and its corollary, Colour Field Painting, and the emerging Minimalist movement and post-Pop art continues to intervene in the visual system, appropriating popular and commercial mass culture content, and compelling us to see and receive art objects, images, and materials in different, disruptive, ironic, and humorous ways
Pop Art was an art movement in the late 1950s and 1960s that reflected everyday life and common objects. Pop artists blurred the line between fine art and commercial art. Once you âgotâ Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
Roy Lichtenstein, Blam, magna on canvas, 1962
Andy Warhol, 200 Campbells Soup Cans, acrylic on canvas, 1962Warholâs work eliminates the idea of the hand made work of art. His works were often based on photographic images transferred directly onto the canvas with stencils.Warholâs work makes us aware again of objects that have lost their usual recognition through constant exposure. We take a fresh look at things familiar to us, recontextualised.
ââŚthe art world is becoming allied with the entertainment industry in both ethos and conduct; there is a growing inability to discriminate between knowledge and information; the intellectual strategies of the avant garde have been supplanted by socially irrelevant and sensationalist shock tactics; the perpetual claims for the right of âfreedom of expressionâ concealed new politically correct strictures on criticism; matters of taste have become matters of opinion, any form of judgement or evaluation; moral or aesthetic, is now offensive and derided as hopelessly anachronistic; contemporary art is collaborating with the media in turning a critical discerning public into a passive consuming mass.â
Pop culture involved a shift in attitudes towards the object. Objects are no longer unique. We know that most of the things we use are made in identical thousands, each indistinguishable from the rest. There was a growing tendency to value things, not for their own sake but in terms of the job they could perform, art felt the effect of this attitude.
Visual images play a primary role in the commerce of contemporary societies.Commodity culture and consumer societies are dependent upon the constant production and consumption of goods in order to function.Advertising images are central to the construction of cultural ideas about lifestyle, self-image, self-improvement, and glamourPop Art in engaged with mass culture in a way that did not condemn it but demonstrated their love of and pleasure in popular culture.
A pop artwork is a frozen event, it comes across to us instantly, and then it has made its point. We need never look at it again. It is in this sense disposable.Fine art objects are also valued because it can be endlessly reproduced for popular consumption on posters, postcards, coffee mugs, and t-shirts.Hence, the value of the original results not only from its uniqueness but also from its role in popular culture.