Art in which commonplace objects (such as

comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) were used as subject matter and were often physically incorporated in the work. The Pop art movement was largely a British and American cultural phenomenon of the late 1950s and ’60s and was named by the art critic Lawrence Alloway in reference to the prosaic iconography of its painting and sculpture.

Pop art represented an attempt to return to a more objective, universally acceptable form of art after the dominance in both the United States and Europe of the highly personal Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism It was also iconoclastic, rejecting both the supremacy

of the “high art” of the past and the pretensions of other contemporary avant-garde art.

Pop art became a cultural event because of its close reflection of a particular social situation and because its easily comprehensible images were immediately exploited by the mass media. Although the critics of Pop art described it as vulgar, sensational, non-aesthetic, and a joke, its proponents (a minority in the art world) saw it as an art that was democratic and nondiscriminatory, bringing together both connoisseurs and untrained viewers.

Pop art was a descendant of Dada, a nihilistic movement current in the 1920s that ridiculed the seriousness of contemporary Parisian art and, more broadly, the political and cultural situation that had brought war to Europe.

Nude Descending a Staircase (1913) by Marcel Duchamp

American Pop art tended to be emblematic, anonymous, and aggressive.

English Pop, more subjective and referential,

expressed a somewhat romantic view of Pop culture fostered perhaps by England’s relative distance from it.

English Pop artists tended to deal with technology and popular culture primarily as themes, even metaphors.

Some American Pop artists actually seemed to live these ideas. Warhol’s motto, for example, was, “I think everybody should be a machine,” and he tried in his art to produce works that a machine would have made.

Pop art was not taken seriously by the public, but it found critical acceptance as a form of art suited to the highly technological, mass-media oriented society of Western countries.

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VEDIO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1kCB5xqk4M&feature=related