attention class!

This is part of my pop art report for the YWAM School of Design...

Pop Art is among the most important visual arts movements of the twentieth century. The Pop artists turned to popular culture and advertising for sources to create representational works that defied the modernist view of avant-garde and kitsch. Pop Art brought ART back to the material realities of everyday life in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines, or comics. With the use of these mundane subject, Pop Art seemed to some observers to be frivolous and reactionary. However, it actually represents a turning point in the history of twentieth-century art.

The most famous artist from the Pop Art movement is Andy Warhol, who became famous worldwide for his work as a painter, avant-garde filmmaker, record producer, author, and public figure.

It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor as well as paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles. Warhol had this to say about Coca Cola: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."

Throughout the decade it became more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift. A pivotal event was the 1964 exhibit The American Supermarket. The exhibit was one of the first mass events that directly confronted the general public with both pop art and the perennial question of what art is.

In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced was awarded the same significance as the unique; the gap between "high art" and "low art" was eroding away. It was easy to understand, easy to recognize because it was iconic and accessible to the mass public. The media’s role was summarized with Warhol's famous quotation: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes". Television, internet, magazines and Hollywood are producing new images everyday. They are only enlarging the popular culture. Everything is just an image, and it’s ready to be consumed.