catapult magazine

Warhol cheap? Yes and yes. One of the best art exhibits I’ve attended was a Warhol exhibit at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. In that context Warhol made alot of sense both as commentary on popular culture and as perpetuator of pop. A row of campbell’s soup cans says so much more in an art museum than on the grocery shelf.

Why is pop art important? Is Warhol’s work portraying cheap or is it cheap itself?

Though I can’t awnser your second question, I’ll try to take a stab at the first.

First of all what do you mean by pop-art? Do you mean primarily visual art that is being created today and has relevent references to today’s culture? Or, by pop art, do you mean the general popular art being created today by people involved in culture? (ie. movies, music, and even vidiogames) Or am I totally missing the point of your question?

I pesonally thing the former is important because it is a “genre” of visual art just as any other; such as surrelism, cubism, realism, impressionism, expresionism, “instalation-ism”, etc.

But pop-art is also important because it is relevent to our culture today. It not only can be understood and easily interpreted because of the accessability of imagry but also reaches the “lowest common denominator” which can be a good thing and a bad thing as well. By saying that it can reach the lowest common denominator I mean that it is accesable to most people in our society and therefore has a very wide audience.

This accesablity is extremely important because it can reach people who normally (though it pains me to say) wouldn’t understand other forms of visual art.

As to the latter of my definitions I would say that they are just as relevent forms of comunication and art that any more “tradional” forms are. Maybe they are even more relevent because of there accessablity. (Like the other form of pop-art I described.)

I hope I helped.