Quotes taken from ‘Movements of Modern
Art: Pop Art’ by Michael Compton
‘(Pop Art’s) history must be to some
extent related to the history of (its) subject matter and sensibility and the
problem of the relationship of so-called fine art with popular art and
imagery.’
‘Inferior art was ruthlessly
excommunicated by art critics. But because the tactics of revolution demanded
that the sharpest confrontation should be with other forms of ‘high art’, which
could be easily designed as bourgeois, ‘low art’ was introduced both as a means
of avoiding the traditional concerns of ‘high art’ and of destroying settled
notions of the nature of art itself.’
On Dada, Impressionism, Cubism and
Primitive art:
‘They are not quite Pop if only
because they are, after all, pictures of common objects in a recognised, though
somewhat simplified, ‘high art’ style. They are not seen through the eyes of
the consumer society nor presented through the visual conventions of its
media.’
On Duchamp and Lichtenstein:
‘anything can be a work of art
regardless of its aesthetic quality; it is a work of art by virtue of the idea
rather than by virtue of its visual qualities .’
-Roy Lichtenstein turned his material
into art
-Andy Warhol believed anything the
public accepted as art, was art
-Richard Hamilton believed art must
find forms for non-art material
-Willem de Kooning sourced adverts and
magazines
-Jackson Pollock posed the question of
whether it was possible to have art without forms
-Larry Rivers, not a Pop artist, based
his work on high art tradition
-From Pop Art to West Coast Surrealist
Assemblage and Junk Art, they that were not satirical nor mocked their
audiences, were all successful.
Significant banality:
Blake – Popular material
Boshier – Toys and games
Toynton – Narrative figuration
Hockney – Graffiti, children’s
paintings and cheap packaging
Peter Philips – Slot machines
Caulfield – Schematic newspapers
‘Sensitiveness to the variables of our
life and economy enable the mass arts to accompany the changes in our life far
more closely than the fine arts which are a repository of time-binding values.’
‘The reception of Pop pointed the way
to the do-it-yourself aesthetic which makes universal art a real possibility.
Pop has effectively destroyed the monolithic rule of taste and substituted a
guerrilla art for the old iron-clad battleships. Pop was only one expression of
a general feeling that was differently expressed by other artists and was part
of a widespread cultural change that involved politics as well as art,
attitudes to sex, fashion, theatre, psychology, design and almost anything else
that makes newspaper headlines.’
Preoccupation with subject matter
leads to direct ideas about popularity, publicity, sales and social analyses, not aesthetic ones.
Further reading:
Lawrence Alloway: ‘The Arts and the
Mass Media’ in Architectural Design, 1958
-‘It is impossible to see them (the
mass media) clearly within a code of aesthetics associated with minorities with
pastoral and upper-class ideas because mass art is urban and democratic.’
Clement Greenberg: ‘Avant Garde and
Kitsch’ in Horizon, 1940
-‘ersatz culture… destined for those
who are insensible to the value of genuine culture …Kitsch using for raw
material the debased and academic simulacra of genuine culture welcomes and
cultivates this insensibility.’
Ivan C Karp: ‘Anti-Sensibility
Painting’ in Art Forum, 1963
-‘What is more beautiful (good) is
imbued with the glorious nimbus of revelation. At its best Common Image Art
violates various established sentiments of the artist. By rendering visible the
despicable without sensibility, it sets aside the precept that the means may
justify the subject. The poetry is invisible. It is the fact of the picture
itself which is the poetry.’
Quotes from Pop artists:
Roy Lichtenstein: ‘The one thing that
everyone hated was commercial art; apparently they didn’t hate that enough
either.
How can you like bad art? I have to
answer that I accept it as being there, in the world.
I prefer that my work appear so
literary that you can’t get to it as a work of art.’
James Rosenquist: ‘Painting is
probably more exciting than advertising –so why shouldn’t it be done with that
power and gusto, with that impact. My metaphor is my relations to the power of
commercial advertising which is in turn related to our free society, the visual
inflation which accompanies the money.’
The Abstract Expressionist era lies in
the position of parents who are no longer able to communicate with their
children. But degrees of contact depend on spectators’ knowledge of original functions and forms.
So the fight goes
Original knowledge – academic opinion
Vs.
No knowledge – original opinion
The fact is that audiences will always
affect art with their own demoralisations.
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