A brief look at Pop art and its place in contemporary society

This is the transcript of a presentation I gave for an Art History and Theory seminar.

How might we compare window shopping and visiting a gallery? Is there an association between Gallery and Supermarket - and which is the modern place of worship in our secularised society?

There are, of course, differences that set the two apart - the factor of affordability of the items on show or on sale; also the accessibility of such objects to the ordinary person and, to an extent, even the value of their inflation. However, it also seems that the Shop and the Gallery have much in common.

You might walk past a Shop and be see a beautiful coat, or you might be awestruck by a painting in a Gallery. But equally, your response could be of utter indifference or even dislike. This, referring to Kant, is the aspect of agreeability, and both Gallery and Shop are domains of agreeability.

Another common feature between the two is the presence of visual language and, perhaps more importantly, visual communication. The shopper-viewer uses their own visual language to differentiate between goods and artworks, and based upon their tastes and beliefs, they determine a judgement of quality, value and aesthetic appeal.

Visual communication is key to the way both shop and gallery are presented. We find objects and goods in an orderly, considered way. In the case of shops, this is to influence our spending, and in the case of galleries it may be the curator’s intention to introduce a narrative to a set of works.

This also poses the question: is the consumer more, or less “savvy” than the collector? (Would it be more foolish to pay a thousand pounds for a designer jacket, or for an oil painting?)

Does the Pop art movement celebrate, or deride the phenomenon of mass culture?

You could argue that Pop art, actually runs parallel to modern culture, in such a way that it is both a tribute and a challenge to the mainstream. Pop art emulates reality in a humorous, but also critical way. Claes Oldenberg, it could be said, opened ‘The Store’ in 1961 to facilitate an understanding of the value of production. For instance, the objects he produced were indiscriminate in their subject matter: cake, clothes, burgers – the common denomination is just that they could be bought, by the average consumer.

There is an ongoing fascination with the business of mainstream culture. Is the work produced by an artist comparable to a print made by a machine (look at Andy Warhol's "200 One Dollar Bills")? Do original works have more value than their reproductions? The answer in most cases - if not all cases - is ‘yes’. But does it depend on how many reproductions are made? Again, it seems, ‘yes’.

How do we define Pop art as a movement?

Pop art is not as whimsical as we might think. It is responsive to the absurdity of our shifting society in the past century or so. This is not to say that it has not benefited from the powerful mass communication that has existed since the turn of the 19^th century.

Strictly speaking, its roots go much further back than the 1950’s and ‘60’s “hey-day” of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and co. It existed before television or radio, and it could be said that since the advances of the industrial revolution, society as a whole has been immersed in mass, communicative culture.

However broadly you might associate them with the movement, many great artists have utilised popular mass media for their own gain. From Dada newspaper collages to Toulouse Lautrec’s theatre posters, an engagement with mainstream culture largely exists in modern art. High art is not excluded. Van Gogh once wrote of a caricature he admired, praising: “If such thing is possible, it has even more sentiment than Holbein‘s Todten tantz!” He was referring to a John Leech cartoon of Tsar Nicholas on his deathbed, published in Punch magazine.

So to conclude, ‘Pop art’, by its broadest definition, has been touched upon in post impressionism, cubism, futurism, abstract expressionism, and it continues to do so in contemporary art.

It is not an inclusive movement, but rather runs alongside modern art and weaves a dialogue in and out of it.