Pop Art: kitsch, irony and the mass market

Pop Art Print
Originally uploaded by NekoJoe

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States, says Wikipedia.[1]

Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Numerous artists turned the comics of the day, movie posters and other forms of cartoons into canvases and hung them in galleries.

Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation.[1][2] The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.[2]

Pop art is an art movement of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock, et al), as well as an expansion upon them.[3]

Pop art, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony.[2] Does this sound familiar to the work of today's graffiti artists? The impact of pop art - its importance - has lasted for several generations.