What is Pop Art ?

1. What is Pop Art? • A major art movement from the mid 1950’s in England and by the early 1960’s was at it’s fullest potential in New York. • Themes and techniques were drawn from popular culture (hence “pop” art): • advertising, mass media • comic strips • celebrity photographs • consumer product packaging • everyday objects

2. What is Pop Art? • It opposed the elitist culture in art, emphasizing kitsch (retro, bad taste). • Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States.[1] Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation.[1][2] The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.[2] • Pop art is an art movement of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popularmass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them.[3] Pop art, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.[2] It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

3. Pop art aims to target a large audience, but is often academic and difficult for some people to understand. The epic, or story, in art was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced was awarded the same significance as the unique. The division between “high art” and “low art” was decreasing. The movement eliminated distinctions between "good" and "bad" taste and between fine art and commercial art techniques. Pop Art!

4. What is Pop Art? • “The term Pop Art was first used by the English critic Lawrence Alloway in a 1958 issue of Architectural Digest to describe those paintings that celebrate post-war consumerism, defy the psychology of Abstract Expressionism, and worship the god of materialism.” • WebMuseum, Nicolas Pioch

5. Andy Warhol • Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. • He drew on images such as comic books, soup cans, movie stars and the media to challenge the "highbrow" views of fine art. • In addition to being an artist, Warhol was a filmmaker, painter, collector, music producer, commercial designer and illustrator, author, magazine publisher, and fashion model.

13. Quotes • “Everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” • “I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.” • “I’ve decided something” Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercials for a mass market it really stinks.” • “When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.”