Text: Eric Shanes
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ISBN: 978-1-78310-749-0
Eric Shanes
The
POPART
Tradition
Responding to Mass-Culture
For John Gage,
friend and mentor
Contents
Andy Warhol,Campbells soup (Turkey Noodle), 1962. Silkscreen ink on canvas, 51 x 40.6 cm. Sonnabend collection.
FOREWORD
Since the late-1950s a new tradition has emerged in Western art. Although its initial phase lasting between about 1958 and 1970 was quickly dubbed Pop Art, that label has always been recognised as a misnomer, for often it has served to obscure far more than it clarified. If anything, the tradition incepted in the late-1950s should be named Mass-Culture Art, for when the British critic Lawrence Alloway coined the phrase Pop in 1958, he was not applying the term to any art yet in existence, let alone to a rebellious youth-orientated Pop culture which was only then in its infancy but which use of the word Pop now tends to suggest (and to do so in an increasingly dated manner). Instead, he was writing about those rapidly increasing numbers of people across the entirety of western society whose very multitudinousness and shared values were causing new forms of cultural expression to come into existence and for whom increasing affluence, leisure and affordable technology were permitting the enjoyment of mass-culture. As we shall see, the central preoccupation of so-called Pop Art has always been the effects and artefacts of mass-culture, so to call the tradition Mass-Culture Art is therefore more accurate (although to avoid art-historical confusion, the term Pop has been retained as a prefix throughout this book). Moreover, mass-culture in all its rich complexity has inspired further generations of artists whom we would never link with Pop Art, thus making it vital we should characterise the tradition to which both they and the 1960s Pop Artists equally contributed as Mass-Culture Art, for otherwise it might prove well-nigh impossible to discern any connection between these groups of artists separated by time and place. The aims of this book are therefore fourfold: to cut across familiar distinctions regarding what is or is not Pop Art by enhancing the latter term; to explore the tradition of Pop/Mass-Culture Art and its causes; to discuss its major contributors; and to examine a representative number of works by those artists in detail.
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