ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the styles of painting (‘hard-edge’ and ‘Op’) and design (graphic and industrial design) are part and parcel of the aesthetic structure of experience. The chapter looks at the aesthetic orientation of artists and critics (e.g. Richard Hamilton's enumeration of Pop aesthetics and Reyner Banham's writing on the ‘genuine feeling of a generation’ in popular art) who apply a connoisseurship to the ‘designed images’ of mass goods—from the streamlined shapes of automobiles to cigarette boxes. Based on stylistic resemblances, the chapter explores a myriad of images—painting, mass consumer goods, commercial graphic design. The discussion follows the idioms of ‘image’ found in vernacular design and looks at how they may correspond to the forms of fine art image (e.g. works presented at the New Generation exhibition). For instance, the chapter re-examines Pop art in light of its mimetic impulse, that is, to explore the ways in which Pop art assimilates the stylistic forms of mass goods and mass media communication. In closely following their formal aesthetic presentations, I suggest that the fine art images in focus align with a constellation of material forms (e.g. Geigy's Op inspired graphic design, newspaper photography, Sainsbury's ‘house style’) that furnish the kinetic energy of the wider visual environment.
