Pop!

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.”