Pop Art

Can you celebrate consumer culture at the same time that you critique it? Pop artists thought so.

c. 1956 - 1980

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With this canvas, Coca-Cola [3], Warhol becomes Warhol.

By laying bare the relationship between commerce and art, Warhol nullified the idea of being a sell out.

This war machine seemed obsolete before it was finished; Rosenquist explains why he painted it with SpaghettiOs.

By putting this in the museum, we see this as art. But what if it weren’t there?

How do you make a nineteenth-century masterpiece ask twentieth-century questions?

Oldenburg’s wonderfully floppy, sloppy cake is filthy, humorous, and not at all edible.

Marilyn’s floating head, garishly colored, functions as the Virgin Mary in a Byzantine icon.

This sculpture, installed on the Yale campus during Vietnam War protests, was never meant to be permanent.

Warhol used a quasi-mechanical process of silkscreen to reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s familiar face again and again.

Pop seems to glorify popular culture, but a second look reveals a critique of post-war marketing and consumerism.

Since 1960, artists have come up with countless ways to engage audiences on a huge spectrum of topics.

videos + essays