Pop Art: Can't Buy My Love

Pop Art emerged in the decades after World War II. In the immediate aftermath, Abstract Expressionism became the dominant style (see our exhibition Abstract Expressionism: Transcending the Radical) but with the war fading in the rearview mirror, artists began to question AbEx’s supremacy and the homogenizing culture of consumption in the United States. Although Pop Art started in the United Kingdom, it was the mass marketing and commercialism of the United States that provided fertile ground for Pop artists.

While artists of other movements channeled their angst and emotions, Pop Artists took the shiny surface of consumption and conformity to reflect it back at an unsuspecting audience.

Pop Artists contextualized and confronted consumption finding both inequal and democratizing characteristics in the surface values of America’s commercialism. Mass consumption and the marketing tied to it has an equalizing but flattening effect. Warhol coolly noted, “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.”