One of my former students e-mailed me last week asking for
guidance on a project she is working on, the subject of which is Pop art,
specifically political images in Pop art. She gave me a list of Pop artists who
have incorporated political images into their works. There were the usual
suspects, of course: Warhol, Rauschenberg, Fairey. But there were also some
artists who would only be recognizable to scholars and New York/L.A. art
gallery mavens.
I’ll start by sharing an excerpt from my e-mail reply to
her: “All man-made objects are works of art,” I reminded her,
since this is the subject of my first lecture each semester. “Everything that a
culture produces is the art of that culture. However, we live in a culture
where ‘art’ is generally considered to be what you see in ‘art’ galleries. This
‘art’ is generally thought to be concerned with personal expression, and the
more inscrutable, the more esoteric, the more ‘high-minded,’ the better.
“But most people don't go to art
galleries. Most people watch T.V., surf the Internet, and go to movie theaters.
And while much of the stuff that they experience in these places is not
particularly ‘high-minded,’ it has a huge impact on what they believe and how they behave. If you want
to understand what is happening in a particular culture, look at the culture.
Frankly, I've never heard of John Stango or Perry Milou. But I've heard of
Bill O'Reilly, and I would say that he is probably the most popular Pop artist
in America today, he and Barack Obama.
“Look at facebook (everybody else
is). Andy Warhol famously said, ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous
for fifteen minutes.’ The funny thing is, Andy Warhol got it. He understood the
impact of the media. That was his whole thing. And the ‘art’ world got it too,
but they promptly forgot it. And they forgot it largely because they were and
are invested in their own deals. Warhol said that art is what you see on the
way to the museum, but the museum doesn't want you to know this.”
The art history textbook of the future
will wrap up the history of painting sometime in the 1950s and continue from
there with the history of television, film and related mass media. This is why Warhol
is such a pivotal figure. He wasn’t just commenting on the impact of mass
media, he was assimilating its methods. He was a commercial artist. He created
his work in a Factory. He made films, produced the Velvet Underground and
started a celebrity magazine. He understood the power of marketing. Of course,
his supreme creation was himself, the image of the artist as celebrity. The
music industry, to take but one example, from the Beatles to Lady Gaga, doesn’t
look the way it does without Andy Warhol.
The most important images, the most
influential images from our culture are not made by “artists,” they are made by
filmmakers, television producers, ad agencies, and so many others, up to and
including random people uploading memes to the Internet (like this one). The
history of Western image-making since the Renaissance has been the introduction
of one technological advancement after another: linear perspective, the
printing press, the development of oil paints, newspapers, photography. Even
photography had a difficult time making it into the traditional narrative. Then
television arrived in the 1950s and Pop! that was the end of painting as the
dominant “art” form. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the standard art
history textbook.
“Museums and galleries,” writes David Summers in Real Spaces, “are only a tiny part of
the social space of the modern world, and the art of museums and galleries will
take us only so far in understanding the conditional transformations of Western
modernity. To keep to the theme of images, the world in which we live as modern
people differs from [every previous culture] in being utterly and continuously
saturated with images, printed and electronic.” Beginning with television, the
electronic media take their place in the history of Western culture, and it is
there that we must look for our Pop “art.”
