Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture (review)

It might seem surprising that Pop art, a style currently commanding some of the highest prices in the art market (in May 2007, Andy Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car Crash sold for $71.7 million at Christie's New York), was once considered a serious threat in the art world. A hard-edged and generally brightly colored kind of painting inspired by the stuff of post–World War II American popular culture (hence, the name), Pop emerged in the mid-1950s in the United States and Europe. If thoroughly embraced today, such that the canvases of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, among others, are hailed as "masterworks," in the early 1960s Pop art was attacked by multiple critics for being frivolous, derivative, and entirely too complicit with consumer cultures. To put it simply, Pop art didn't fit with then current definitions of "art," and in particular, various strains of postwar, Cold War modernism like Abstract Expressionism. This, of course, was precisely what most Pop artists were up to: challenging elitist assumptions about the nature and purpose of modern art; proposing a new kind of American art that freely borrowed on the subjects and style of mass culture in order to raise questions about postwar social realities.

Sara Doris's Pop Art and the Contest Over American Culture provides a compelling reevaluation of Pop, especially in terms of how it—and the critical discourse surrounding it—embodied postwar anxieties about mass culture's creeping authority. Recent scholars have been divided on this: some arguing that Pop uncritically championed mass culture, others that it worked to destabilize boundaries between high and low. If Doris veers to the latter, the major contribution of her book is to position Pop within its larger historical, social, and political context, most notably "the point of transition between the conservatism and conformity of the Cold War 1950s and the radicalized countercultural movements of the later 1960s" (62-63).

Focusing on postwar assumptions about taste, culture, and social mobility, Doris reconsiders Pop from the vantage of 1960s youth and Camp cultures and argues for its pivotal role in reshaping modern—and contemporary—understandings of American art and artists, and the culture industry in general. This includes the rapidity with which modern art styles—aping mass consumerism, and notions of planned obsolescence—emerged in postwar America. Already, by 1962, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler observed that Pop had become "art historical," largely because of its mass mediation in magazines like Life and Time and its eager appropriation by a new generation of art dealers and collectors. Although critics argued that Pop wasn't even art, their guardianship of American taste was steadily undermined by a booming 1960s art market which saw Pop art prices escalate like IBM stock. The upshot of this, as Doris recounts, was that Pop's more critically subversive overtures—evident in Warhol's death and disaster pictures of car crashes and race riots, and Rosenquist's F-111 (1964–1965), a gigantic mural-sized painting of a Vietnam era fighter-bomber interspersed with images of mass-marketed commodities—were ignored. In the end, Pop was itself viewed on consumer terms: as a cultural commodity, as the style to buy.