The Pop Art Tradition: Responding to Mass-Culture

This book offers a radically new perspective on the socalled Pop Art creative dynamic that has been around since the 1950s. It does so by enhancing the term Pop Art which has always been recognised as a misnomer, for it obscures far more than it clarifies. Instead, the book connects all the art in question to mass-culture which has always provided its core inspiration. Above all, the book suggests that this Mass- Culture Art has created a new Modernist tradition which is still flourishing. The book traces that tradition down the forty and more years since Pop/Mass-Culture Art first came into being in the 1950s, and locates it within its larger historical context. Naturally the book discusses the major contributors to the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition right down to the present, in the process including a number of artists who have never previously been connected with socalled Pop Art but who have always been primarily interested in mass-culture, and who are therefore partially or totally connected with Pop/Mass-Culture Art. The book reproduces in colour and discusses in great detail over 150 of the key works of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition. Often this involves the close reading of images whose meaning has largely escaped understanding previously. The result is a book that qualitatively is fully on a level with Eric Shanes's other best-selling and award-winning writings.