ABSTRACT

The term 'pop art' encompasses a wide variety of paintings, sculptures, prints and collages produced by professional artists who used popular culture and mass media material as sources of iconography, techniques and conventions of representation. Considered as a whole, pop exemplifies a mixed response to mass culture: some examples appear to celebrate consumer products and media stars, while others indicate a critical, analytical response. Most mass culture is the output of cultural industries and businesses owned by powerful individual entrepreneurs, corporations or groups of shareholders. When American pop art first appeared some critics accused the artists responsible for it of plagiarism, that is, copying the work of commercial artists. As the iconography of pop art indicates, much of it was a positive response to the newly affluent society. The social functions that portraits and statues of famous leaders performed in the past have now been largely superseded by poster-size photographs of movie and rock/pop music stars.