The 1960s were marked by a wave of radicalism. From the global student protests demanding democracy to the countercultural revolution that swept the world, the decade transformed the social and political landscape, and its effects are still felt today. The ’60s also cemented New York as the epicenter of the West’s (white, male-dominated) avant-garde, even though that road had been paved in the 1950s by Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and others who enchanted critic Clement Greenberg, such as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler—artists who the esteemed critic thought of as carrying the torch of art history into the modern era.
But by the mid-1960s, the perspectives of Greenberg, Pollock, and their ilk began to feel
…show more content…
While it was Andy Warhol in America who perfected the incision that ripped open the contemporary art stage, leaving behind the terms and conditions defining “fine art,” Pop actually originated in England with Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). But America, a country whose cultural life is dominated by consumerism, offered abundant visual material for Warhol to mastermind a true conceptual revolution: artmaking driven by critical mass and celebrity.
By now, Warhol’s exploits with Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe are deeply ingrained in the popular imagination, but in 1962—when Warhol began working exclusively in the photographic silkscreen series that he carried on through 1965—the mere idea that something as banal and mundane as a cheaply manufactured food product or a Hollywood starlet could be viewed as art was received as a big middle finger to the history of painting, and to the cultural establishment in general. Here was a mixing of high- and lowbrow cultures, allowing for a “no-brow” mentality to permeate into cultural