Stacey Suver's essay, A Pop Life, explores the different types of pop culture and its effect on Americans and their everyday lives. (Suver, 2011) Suver successfully uses devices, such as first-person point of view, several allusions, an informative tone, and rhetorical questions, that work together to form a well-organized essay that teaches his audience about the influences of pop culture. Suver's composition can be compared to Napalm, a piece of street art created by an anonymous graffiti artist out of Great Britain. (Banksy Biography, 2014)
For one, this book offers many, rather critical commentaries on American popular culture, primarily via Egan's exploration of the music industry; she expresses the way in which trends come and go as well as the effects of these cultural shifts, which often leave once famous individuals, such as Bosco, in the dust. What is popular in one moment (in this case, punk rock) can easily and quickly be replaced by another trend (overproduced pop music and music aimed primarily at preverbal toddlers). This struggle rings especially true for two characters, Bennie and
These prints are done on canvas, using inks, or on water-colour paper. This came about
Some say that Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are not considered art for two reasons. One, being that he uses a combination of personal skill and also machinery to complete
Pop culture in today's day have revealed a semiotic truth to how we have come to be as a society in this world. Upon further observations with the help of the applied method Jack Solomon detailed to us in his Masters of Desire:The Culture of American Advertising article, we can thoroughly conclude that America is a nation of fantasizers. By using semiotic signs, analyzes and critiques of certain things like music videos have become significantly more protruded in a sense. Stories between the cinematography and lyrics extend to individuals around the world to bring them all together and exploit the groups fantasies and desires, as well as reveal an absentminded reality. In short, the semiotic signs Jack Solomon described to us go hand in hand with signs that revolve around the world of music,
Not only is he an innovative artist he has an analytical nature that led him to question artistic processes from history. His theories about the use of technology in aiding realistic painting give a different perspective of art history. Artists have always had strong opinions about the use of technology in aiding their artwork. Some do not see the art created as a pure expression of talent. If Hockney’s theories are correct they prove that technology has always been used.
Both pieces acknowledge the mass production vital to capitalism, to the creation of an icon in modern society. Koons is praising someone he personally idolizes, and has captured his idol as seen through Koons’ eyes as a consumer (“Jeff Koons: A Retrospective”). Koons’ piece demonstrates how his art’s positive portrayal of a celebrity can further advance that celebrity as an idol by turning them into a newly created physical object of desire, of
RICHARD HAMILTON > Analysing Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? with the context of the work in mind as a post-war expression which criticises consumerisms penetration of domestic life and the result of which being a commodified domestic space. > Exploring the collage of advertising used to create ‘fine art’ (otherwise considered as “committed cultural opponents”) and the irony in that artistic choice as the artwork is “literally assembled out of fragments of consumer magazines.”
The earliest known fashion photographs date back to the 1850s. Photography used for advertising had not become popular until the early 20th century when fashion started to be accessible to a larger audience. Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue were the first fashion magazines in the late 1800’s . These magazines were first illustrated by hand until Condé Nast had hired Baron Adolph De Meyer in 1913 to shoot portraits of models, actresses, and aristocrats for Vogue. Magazine importance became bigger in the early 20th century due to collaborations with well known designers.
“Bitumen” traces the sublime from its 18th century inception to more contemporary representations. First postulated by Edmund Burke, the sublime was traditionally described as a feeling of astonishment and terror when faced with a vast and incomprehensible object, which ultimately referred to God via nature. Noticeably influenced by Burke’s theories, Romantic art from the early 19th century frequently sought to depict the sublime. Paintings such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and J.M.W Turner’s Slave Ship, which appear in “Bitumen”, are apposite to many of Burke’s tenets. They conjure the sublime by presenting an awesome and terrible nature which figures largely in their works.
In his article “The Naysayers,” Alex Ross analyzes the debate that looms between Benjamin and Adorno. Ross concludes that “if Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, [Adorno] might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized” (Ross). That fear being is Adorno’s expressed concern that music was progressing as another tool for the capitalist society. Unfortunately, this concern of Adorno’s has become all too realized, particularly in the pop music industry. Artists like along the lines of Justin Bieber and Kesha are manufactured products.
There were two factors that were key for the time, and that conditioned the flourishing art of poster printing. One of them was the rapid development of the middle class, that had not only the means to consume but was also growing more sophisticated and cultured, meaning that what it consumed had to correspond. The other was the technique that allowed to meet the demand: lithography.
Reproduction of the sign was one characteristic of this brand of art. This reproduction was used to show that we as consumers of “Pop Culture” live excessively whether it’s regarding consumption of products or how we blindly obsess over celebrities. “Unlike Dada, whose entirely negative aim was to subvert and undermine the values of a bourgeois establishment which they blamed for the carnage of World War I, Pop-art sought to reflect the social values and environment from which it sprang. Thus they focused on the preoccupations shared by most American consumers: food, cars and romance. Typically, this was achieved using brash, or satirical, imagery with strong visual impact.
The culture industry and market commercials are dominant institutions because of the power of the media. This power of the media comes from the Capitalists as they are the driving force to the consumption of goods. In Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, his theory of mass culture consists of our imaginations being taken by false realities. The consumer no longer can think for themselves and instead are planted with ideas of prescribed happiness. According to Adorno, propaganda was not only used under Fascism but see’s it being used to manipulate.
People are immersed in popular culture during most of our waking hours. It is on radio, television, and our computers when we access the Internet, in newspapers, on streets and highways in the form of advertisements and billboards, in movie theaters, at music concerts and sports events, in supermarkets and shopping malls, and at religious festivals and celebrations (Tatum,
