A taste for pop
Subtitle: pop art, gender, and consumer culture
By: Cécile Whiting.
Series: Cambridge studies in American visual culture
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Cambridge [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
Subjects: Popular culture -- United States; Subculture -- United States
Description: When Pop-art paintings depicted Campbell soup cans or comic-book scenes of teen romance, did they stoop to the level of their mundane sources, or did they instead transmogrify the detritus of consumer culture into high art? In this study, Cecile Whiting declares the issues fundamentally irresolvable and instead takes the question itself, along with the varied answers it has generated, as the object of her analysis.

Whiting presents case studies that focus on works by four artists - Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Marisol Escobar - who are closely associated with the Pop-art movement.

Throughout her engaging analyses, Whiting unravels the gendered overtones of their cultural manoeuverings, noting how the connotations of masculinity as attached to the seriousness of high art, and the presumed frivolity and caprice of a feminine world of consumption repositioned cultural frontiers and reformulated the relation between sexes.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-295) and index.