pop art
Article
pop art is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 04, 2024 and January 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Wolfe ties this to the contemporaneous rise of pop art”; “In art and architecture, the drive to be “in touch” took the form of pop art”. It most often appears alongside Edward Stone, Frank Lloyd Wright, From Bauhaus To Our House.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: December 04, 2024
- Last seen: January 08, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Edward Stone (2 shared issues)
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- Frank Lloyd Wright (2 shared issues)
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- From Bauhaus To Our House (2 shared issues)
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- Peter Eisenman (2 shared issues)
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- Saarinen (2 shared issues)
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- Stone (2 shared issues)
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- Tom Wolfe (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- DogeCoin (1 shared issues)
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- 3D printing (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Wolfe ties this to the contemporaneous rise of pop art. Modern art and architecture were founded in the rejection of bourgeois notions of beauty, in favor of a faux-proletarian idea of simplicity and scientificness. But, Venturi pointed out, proletarians were kind hard to find in c. 1970 America. Grounding your class analysis in a non-existent proletariat seemed kind of out-of-touch, and so - perhaps - bourgeois. Who actually existed? The middle class. And what did the middle class like? Mass market consumer slop. Therefore, the true foundation of Art should be mass market consumer slop. Of course, since artists are superior to the middle class, it should be some sort of extremely complicated reference to mass market consumer slop which makes it clear that the artist themselves is infinitely above such things (but also, what if they weren’t above it, because they were so in-touch with normal people (but also, obviously they’re infinitely above it (but also, what if they weren’t))) . . . and so on. This tendency eventually became postmodernism with all its layers of irony and self-reference.
In art and architecture, the drive to be “in touch” took the form of pop art and postmodern architecture, where artists took the materials of normal public life (like Cambpell’s soup cans) and transformed it in some kind of complicated way. The average member of the public might think “Campbell soup! That artist is in touch with my everyday existence!” while also being baffled by layers of ironic reference and artistic flourishes outside his puny little brain’s ability to comprehend. A+ instant classic.