Pop art
art movement
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.
Quotes on Pop art
- People keep on wanting fetish figures, and things like that are very popular. That’s pop art. There was an enormous resistance to Abstract Expressionism and there still is to that school, which is not dead at all. But pop art came as a reaction to that because kids can’t paint abstract expressionism unless they’re under five year of age. Because it really is tremendously hard work and it’s very challenging. But the point is, people love an immediately recognizable word – if you put a word in anything, they lie it.. ..I am not interested in culture at all. Once a work of art has gotten into the culture, its dead as far as I’m concerned. I think there is a difference between art and culture. Or as the sage once said, “Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us.
- Carl Andre in: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, ed. Peggy Gale, The Press N.S.C.A.D, Nova Scotia, Canada 2004 pp. 22-23
- Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.
- Leonard Baskin, Publishers Weekly (5 April 1965).
- Pop Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion.
- Grace Hartigan As quoted in "Grace Hartigan, 86, Abstract Painter, Dies" in The New York Times (18 November 2008)
- In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.
- Pauline Kael, State of the Art, (1985) "A Bad Dream/A Masterpiece," review of The Moon in the Gutter (1983-09-19), p. 48.
- I’ve always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and Surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That’s what I’ve always done.
- Jeff Koons in: Graeme Green. "60 SECONDS: Jeff Koons," at metro.co.uk, 2007/07/18
- What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
- Roy Lichtenstein in: Interview by G.R. Swenson; cited in: Eric Protter (1971). Painters on Painting. p. 263
- We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?
- Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (1966); Introducing our Argument
- It is the transcendent [or 'abstract' or 'self-contained'] nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
- Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1982). Themes and Conclusions, Berkley: University of California Press. p. 188.
- Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody.
Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.- Andy Warhol in: "What Is Pop Art?" Art News, November 1963
