ABSTRACT
If the 1960s can be characterized as being the decade of ‘pop’, with the theoretical recognition of pop art, pop music and popular culture, then the 1980s might be considered the decade of ‘Post’: postmodernism, poststructuralism, post-marxism, post-feminism. Read in this key, pop was among the final gestures of modernism. As the closing curtain-call of the attempt to transform the icons and tastes of popular culture into art, to close the gap and æstheticize the everyday, it effectively signalled the termination of a lengthy European debate on ‘culture and society’.1 By the 1960s the once religious distinction between these categories was being continually breached by the speed and success of such secular, cheap, commercial cultural languages as cinema, television, pop music, fashion and associated urban styles. ‘It’s not really pop art. It’s just regular…it’s the way we are …pop life’, said Kenny Scharf. Of course, in moving from that moment to this, from pop to post, it is easy to exaggerate and inflate change and become a ventriloquist of stylistic circumstances; but there is, nevertheless, a complex shift in gravity, a decidedly altered state and feel to the present that was neither felt nor anticipated twenty or thirty years ago. The overall constellation of thought, critical work, artistic production and everyday life has decisively shifted and acquired new bearings in the universe of our histories.
