Whaam!
When the kitschy, banal, and mass-market became art
Peaking in the 1960s,
Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of
what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from
advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by
Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such
popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed
methods of mass-production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.
With featured artists including
Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and
Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.
