Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Art), or they attacked authority with absurd performances to make a political statement
(conceptual art).
Pop Art
America's postwar wealth made the consumer king. Pop Art is created from the popular
objects of that throwaway society—soup cans, car fenders, tacky plastic statues, movie
icons. Take a Sears product, hang it in a museum, and you have to ask: Is this art? Are
mass-produced objects beautiful? Or crap? Why do we work so hard to acquire them? Pop
Art, like Dadaism before it, questions our society's values.
Andy Warhol (who coined “15 minutes of fame”) concentrated on another mass-pro-
duced phenomenon: celebrities. He took publicity photos of famous people and repro-
duced them. The repetition—like the constant bombardment we get from recurring images
on TV—cheapens even the most beautiful things.
Roy Lichtenstein took a comic strip, blew it up, hung it on a wall, and charged a milli-
on bucks—whaam, Pop Art. Lichtenstein supposedly was inspired by his young son, who
challenged him to do something as good as Mickey Mouse. The huge newsprint dots never
let us forget that the painting—like all commercial art—is an illusionistic fake. The work's
humor comes from portraying a lowbrow subject (comics and ads) on the epic scale of a
masterpiece.
Op Art
Optical illusions play tricks with your eyes, the way a spiral starts to spin when you stare at
it. These obscure scientific experiments in color, line, and optics suddenly became trendy
in the psychedelic '60s.
All forms of authority—“The Establishment”—seemed bankrupt. America's president
resigned in the Watergate scandal, corporations were polluting the earth, and capitalism
nearly ground to a halt when Arabs withheld oil.
Artists attacked authority and institutions, trying to free individuals to discover their
full human potential. Even the concept of “modernism”—that art wasn't good unless it
was totally original and progressive—was questioned. No single style could dictate in this
postmodern period.
