Pop Art And The Origins Of Post Modernism

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.

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.

Traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the postmodern idea. Beginning in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, the text takes the reader through to the 70s, when Lyotard and Habermas gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency and finally the 90s, with the work of Fredric Jameson.

Leo Steinberg’s classic Other Criteria comprises eighteen essays on topics ranging from “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public” and the “flatbed picture plane” to reflections on Picasso, Rauschenberg, Rodin, de Kooning, Pollock, Guston, and Jasper Johns. The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called “a tour de force of critical method,” is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns’s work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations. “The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights—although the quality is very high and the insights are important—as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords.” —Alfred Frankenstein, Art News “Not only one of the most lucid and independent minds among art critics, but a profound one.”—Robert Motherwell

Pop Art and Beyond foregrounds the roles of gender, race, and class in encounters with Pop during the Long Sixties. Exploring the work of over 20 artists from 5 continents, it offers new perspectives on Pop's heterogeneity. Featuring an array of rigorous chapters written by both acclaimed experts and emerging scholars, this anthology transcends the borders of individual and national contexts, and suspends hierarchies creating a space for the work of artists like Andy Warhol and the women of the Black Arts Movement to converse. It casts an inclusive look at the intersectional complexities of difference in Pop at a moment that gave rise to a plethora of radical social movements and identity politics. While this book introduces revelatory non-canonical artists into the Pop context or amplifies the careers of others, it is not limited to the confines of fine art. Chapters explore the intersecting variables of oppression and liberation in rituals of youth subcultures as well as practices across media with Pop sources and parallels ranging from Native American objects, Harlem advertisements, and Cordel literature, to stand-up comedy, music, fashion, and design. Pop Art and Beyond thus widens the conversation about what Pop was and what it can be for current art in its struggle for social justice and critiques of power.

The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.