ABSTRACT
Gene Swenson's interviews with eight Pop artists in two issues of Art News constitute one of the primary documents of Pop Art—the movement that shook the art world in the early sixties. The first group exhibition in the United States bringing together the artists for whom the sobriquet "Pop" was soon universally adopted was the New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, November 1-December 1, 1962. Pop is still pro-art, but surely not art for art's sake. Nor is it any Neo-Dada anti-art manifestation: its participants are not intellectual, social and artistic malcontents with furrowed brows and fur-lined skulls. A curator at the Modern Museum has called Pop Art fascistic and militaristic. Pop Art has very immediate and of-the-moment meanings which will vanish—that kind of thing is ephemeral—and Pop takes advantage of this "meaning," which is not supposed to last, to divert you from its formal content.
