Pop-art is images of popular things.

Pop-art is images of ordinary objects,mass produced common everyday items that most people like and recognize.

Items like record labels, or logos, or packaging, and fashion pictures of people, Road signs, hamburgers, money, soda bottles, (you know, stuff you see around you, anything currently in vogue RIGHT NOW) and machinery are also common subjects.

Pop-art is also subjects and techniques taken from commercial artists, such as computer art, or silk screen images by Robert Rauschenberg, or comic book panels by Roy Lichtenstein.

Almost any symbol of modern industrial life may be considered pop-art.

Also included are themes of popular culture taken from movies, television, and advertising art,including paintings by Roy Lichtenstein of large comic book panels.

• "Just What is it that makes Today's Homes so different so Appealing?"

British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art.

Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London.

Hamilton helped organize the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with its landmark image "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?" (1956).

Hamilton was interested in the new ideas of communication promoted by Marshall McLuhan and Cybernetics and the piece has all the human senses cast in various modes. Can you locate them?

 

The work is comparable to the "Arnolfini Wedding" in having a young couple surrounded by their worldly goods.

The Assignment:

In having a young couple surrounded by their worldly goods, both artists, in their respective works, are commenting on contemporary living. What stylistic choices have the artists used to portray that theme?

The Arnolfini Wedding