British Pop Art And Postmodernism

British Pop Art was seen as an integral, even central, part of social change in the Sixties. It was a movement that developed innovative ways of dealing with reality, both reflecting on and participating in the culture. Its aesthetics was often homogeneous with the industrial, with the mass-produced, and, hence, with the artificial, manufactured character of the urban environment. This discontinuity in the traditional approach towards artistic creation furthered the globalization of diversity, which constitutes the abiding concerns of postmodern art. Drawing from postmodern thought and cultural analysis, this book critically examines British Pop Art within the broad interdisciplinary domain of the social and cultural changes that led to flexibility in conceptualization, and provides a contribution to the artistic processes which form and deform the cultural sphere, confirming its relevance to current debates in which questions of postmodern aesthetics prominently figure.

Examines the critical reception of Pop Art, identifying the American roots of deconstructive post-modernism.

Examines the critical reception of Pop Art, identifying the American roots of deconstructive post-modernism.

The techniques utilized, however, varied: the Americans generally used a more reductive method, arriving at a centralized iconic image, while the British preferred an episodic approach that generated an implied narrative. As the essays in this book make clear, Pop Art promoted no specific agenda beyond the investigation of the prevailing American environment."--BOOK JACKET.

This reader is intended as a theoretical, analytical and historical introduction to the study of popular culture within cultural studies. It is divided into seven representative sections. The first six sections each contain a selection of readings from a particular approach to popular culture: culture and civilisation tradition; culturalism; structuralism and post-structuralism; Marxism; feminism; and postmodernism, providing a comprehensive overview and examples of the main theoretical perspectives. The final section contains readings from recent debates within the study of popular culture. Together, these sections chart the theoretical development of the study of popular culture within cultural studies, and provide examples of the analysis of the texts and practices of popular culture within each specific tradition. Each section is introduced, edited and contextualised by John Storey.

This fully revised third edition of The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism provides the ideal introduction to postmodernist thought. Featuring contributions from a cast of international scholars, the Companion contains 19 detailed essays on major themes and topics along with an A-Z of key terms and concepts. As well as revised essays on philosophy, politics, literature, and more, the first section now contains brand new essays on critical theory, business, gender and the performing arts. The concepts section, too, has been enhanced with new topics ranging from hypermedia to global warming. Students interested in any aspect of postmodernism will continue to find this an indispensable resource.

The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path; the world was witnessing political and social transformations without precedent. Artists, seeing it all firsthand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution took—how artists in the 1980s marked their societies' traumatic transition from decaying socialism to an insecure future—emerges in this remarkable volume. With in-depth perspectives on art and artists in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Mitteleuropa, China, and Cuba—all from scholars and art critics who were players in the tumultuous cultural landscapes they describe—this stunningly illustrated collection captures a singular period in the history of world art, and a critical moment in the cultural and political transition from the last century to our own. Authors Ales Erjavec, Gao Minglu, Boris Groys, Péter György, Gerardo Mosquera, and Misko Suvakovic observe distinct national differences in artistic responses to the social and political challenges of the time. But their essays also reveal a clear pattern in the ways in which artists registered the exhaustion of the socialist vision and absorbed the influence of art movements such as constructivism, pop art, and conceptual art, as well as the provocations of western pop culture. Indebted to but not derived from capitalist postmodernism, the result was a unique version of postsocialist postmodernism, an artistic/political innovation clearly identified and illustrated for the first time in these pages.