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Pop Art Was Simply a Reflection of Consumer Society and Mass Media, Not a Critique. Discuss with Reference to the Work of 3 Artists. Essay Example

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Pop Art Was Simply a Reflection of Consumer Society and Mass Media, Not a Critique. Discuss with Reference to the Work of 3 Artists. Essay Example
Pop art was simply a reflection of consumer society and mass media, not a critique. Discuss with reference to the work of 3 artists.

Pop Art was one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. It brought art back to the material realities of daily life, in which ordinary people derived most their visual pleasure from popular mass culture, such as advertising, television, magazines, or comic books and comic strips. As it emerged from the experiments of the fifties, was the ideal instrument for coming to grips with the American urban environment. (Stangos, 1997) As the post-war generation and the stable political situation, it drove people back to the qualities of life. At the same times, America urban environment was influence by industrialism, consumer society and the mass media explosion.
The pop artists have found subjects, which have previously been ‘invisible’ because they are so much a part of our surroundings that we don’t see them. These things now begin to appear, once the artists have pointed them out, and we discover that the world is full of ‘Pop object,’ which are expressive of our times and our values for better or for worse. (Mahsun, 1989, p.163) Pop art was established from the reality of basic consumer society; therefore, it was accepted by the society easily.

Pop art is said to be a reflection of culture as artists are giving new interpretation to different ordinary objects in their art works. Jasper Johns establish his career in art in 1954, he uses flags, numbers, letters and maps these kind of common symbols in daily life as element or theme of his art work. Jasper talks about his work, ‘Flags’ (fig.1), in which he thinks that flag this kind of most ordinary objects ‘can be dealt with without having to judge them, they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.’ (Harrison and Wood, 2001, p.721) He adds that ‘one thinks it has forty-eight stars and suddenly it has fifty stars; it is no longer of any

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