Woman Yellow

Pop Art
was an art movement that was first recognized during the 1960’s, with the popularity of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, whose choice of subject was taken from the popular images disseminated through television and other media. 

By turning visual input, the frequency of which was such that the mind became immune to and unmoved by them, into the subject of art, pop artists were attempting to stimulate the perceiver to recognize those images that their eyes took for granted, and appreciate them on an artistic level. In other cases, pop artists simply wanted to show the art-going public how, when you put a frame around an image (no matter what its style or import), it somehow becomes art. Few of us would deny that another reason for the mass production and ready-made subjects of the pop art movement was for the sake of profit. Certainly, the distinction between art and advertising became blurred due to the pop artists’ uses of commercial images without any alteration or corruption, and the pop artists themselves made a good deal of money from the accessibility and ease of their work.

In America, Pop Art is often considered as a counter-attack against Abstract Expressionism because it used more figurative aspects in its works. It was also related closely to Dada, an earlier movement (largely French) that poked fun at the highbrow and serious nature of the art world and also used everyday objects and mundane subjects. Warhol's rows of Campbell's tins of tomato soup are equivalent to Marcel Duchamp’s bicycles and urinals placed in galleries.

A key aspect of Pop Art is self-reference, drawing upon the media commons to construct a simulacrum of our collective imagination, using a composite of images that we see everyday. This self- reference, or separation from historical or cultural context, is the essence of postmodernism, and has come to define the contemporary American perspective of art. The 1970’s-1980’s vogue of conceptual painting affirmed the postmodern model of art in America, with its emphasis on newness and progress, on invention and interpretation, rather than coherence or representation. It should be noted however that realism, despite its new subversive status in the art scene, was still in practice by many (esp. portrait artists) commensurate with the pop art and conceptual art movements.

Chuck Close, who began as a photo-realist in the 1960’s and 1970’s (when photo-realism was quite unfashionable) and developed his own artistic technique in the 80's of what is sometimes inaccurately called ’neo-pointillism’, is often credited with the re-popularizing the self-portrait. 

The diversity of the art world today allows us the freedom to choose our own themes and subjects, provided that we can connect our own fields of interest with a potential market. In this, the Internet is indispensable, and remains the uncharted ground of art exposition.

Pop Art is lots of things that high-art isn't - it's mass-produced, it is expendable, it is low-cost, glamorous, witty and encourages big bucks, bright lights and big celebrities - there's no sign of the impoverished artist slaving away in a tiny studio in this movement. However, it's light-hearted sensibilities have been negated by some critics; Harold Rosenberg described Pop art as being 'Like a joke without humor, told over and over again until it begins to sound like a threat. 

Advertising art which advertises itself as art that hates advertising.' 

Is Pop Art a serious comment on the contemporary condition – are the Pop artists cynical of the growing mass-media, material culture or is it simply just popular art – accessible, bright and glossy?