These activities suggested not a disgust with popular culture but a celebration of it. The Independent Group was a precursor to British Pop art, a movement that continued to play with the cultural imports of the United States. By adopting an aesthetic of prosperous commercialization from an outsider point of view, British Pop art encouraged sexual liberation, employed bold and accessible designs and, with a touch of irony, raised mundane, mass-produced images to a high-art status.
Pop art rose to prominence in the U.S in the 1960s. Up until that time, Abstract Expressionism was at the forefront of modern art in America, with artists like Jackson Pollock expressing the grief and anger of post-war America through loose and highly abstract splatters of paint on a canvas. Pollock claimed that ‘the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating’ (1999, 21). Pop art saw the pendulum of modern art swing. Instead of being guided by subjective emotion which produced highly abstract works, Pop art was more objective, using precise repetition of widely recognized and understood images. This shift partly aimed to retrieve art from the privacy of the artist and an understanding of art from elitist institutions, returning it to the everyday.
While early British Pop art looked upon the consumerist world of America from afar, speculating on the lifestyle and culture that this commercialization fostered, American Pop art was responding to and participating in that lifestyle and culture. While this resulted in similar aesthetics, British Pop art is often heralded as expressing the fun, the irony, and the depravity of big-picture consumerism, whereas Pop art in the U.S. dealt more with the aesthetic of the everyday, blurring the lines between art and commercialization.
Pop art, commercialization and the avant-garde
In Jackson Pollock, Claud Cernuschi posits that ‘the task of the avant-garde is to segregate art from the corrupting influence of popular taste and ensure high standards of quality’ (2021). Like most avant-garde art movements, Pop art represented a rebellious attitude towards popular art standards and the aesthetic and cultural acceptability the art world facilitated. However, we also understand Pop art to be an avant-garde movement largely made up of images taken from the commercial world. There is an inherent tension in Pop art between the avant-garde detachment of art from the commercial world, and the use of commercial imagery. The question that Pop art provokes is one that attends to the simultaneous criticism of popular artistic tastes and the use of pop culture aesthetic, advertising and mass-production.
When Grudin asks whether Pop artists were ‘resurrecting Marcel Duchamp’s or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s ironic and sophisticated readymades, or searching out and celebrating the most exhilarating visual culture available,’ he touches on the debated origins and intentions of Pop art (2017). Parallels are often drawn between Pop Art and Dada. Dada challenged the art world through ‘readymades’: mundane, mass-produced objects placed in a gallery setting. Dada and Pop art certainly share the ambition to return art to everyday life, blurring the lines between low and high-brow art. But was Pop art guided by the radical principles of the avant-garde, set out by movements like Dada, or inspired by the aesthetics of consumerism? Did Pop art mock the capitalism of the art institution or did it merely celebrate the popularity of commercial ‘visual culture’? Whether the former or latter — if they are even mutually exclusive — this question raises a defining paradox of the avant-garde: art becomes subsumed and capitalized on by the very institution it sought to challenge. Avant-garde artists challenge the expectations of art in order to engender social change, but this art gets picked up by the art institution and becomes popular and profitable. Regardless of its intention, Pop art provides an example of the way that art can belong to both the worlds of high art and commercialization, can be simultaneously avant-garde and popular.
Andy Warhol and Pop art
These questions regarding the avant-garde’s relationship to established institutions arose in part in response to Andy Warhol. Warhol’s name has become synonymous with the Pop art movement. His most famous works are made up of repeated images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Soup Cans, as well sculptural pieces of wooden dollar signs and stacked Brillo boxes. Not only did his art depict the mass-produced offerings of consumerist America, but his process also reflected this mass-production through the repetition of screen-printed images. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Soup Can pieces exemplify this style, where the same image is repeated with different colours and levels of light exposure. These were often interpreted as a satire on the illusion of variety and choice presented to consumers, but garnered mixed reviews.
As Arthur Danto explains, in Andy Warhol, Warhol’s ‘art was typically interpreted by European intellectuals as critical both of American mass culture and of the products of American capitalism, like Campbell’s soup’ (2009). Danto goes on to describe the different reception of Warhol’s early work in America,
