Pop Art

This book offers a radically new perspective on the so-called ‘Pop Art’ creative dynamic that has been around since the 1950s. It does so by enhancing the term ‘Pop Art’, which has always been recognised as a misnomer, for it obscures far more than it clarifies. Instead, the book connects all the art in question to mass-culture, which has always provided its core inspiration. Above all, the book suggests that this mass-culture art created a new modernist tradition that is still flourishing. The book traces that tradition through the forty or more years since Pop/Mass-Culture Art first came into being in the 1950s, and places it in a larger historical context. Naturally, the book discusses the major contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition from the beginning of the movement to the present. It includes a number of artists who have never previously been connected with so-called ‘Pop Art’ but have always been primarily interested in mass-culture, and who are therefore partially or totally connected with Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The book discusses in detail over 100 colour reproductions of the key works of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Often this involves the close reading of images whose meaning has largely escaped understanding previously. The result is a book that qualitatively is fully on a level with Eric Shanes’s other best-selling and award-winning works.