Each of the Pop artists had a different definition of what they thought Pop Art was. There was an almost general consensus that it was all based on the rise of American consumerism and industrialism, but each utilized these developments in slightly varying ways to keep Pop from having a set standard of Aesthetic principles. Pop is understood to be an art that is to be readable by the masses, as opposed to the art work of the previous Abstract Expressionist and Surrealist movements that focused on art as a visual representation of theories posed by the artists.
Pop Art reintroduced the connection between art and the present world. “Everything is possible in Pop,” because according to Warhol, “Pop is everything.” It incorporates the mundane objects of everyday life and presents them in a glorified manner, but it does not bind the artist to a particular style or aesthetic quality. It allows the artist the freedom to produce images instantly, anywhere, and in mass quantity if he/she so wishes. The spontaneity of Pop, along with the use of iconic subject matter of the decade, therefore, gave it a sort of mortality that bound it to the time period in which it was created. Audiences today do not understand the artwork as immediately as those of the 1960s, much like audiences today do not read the symbolism of Medieval Christian art like the church-goers and readers of the Bible for the Illiterate did in the Middle Ages.
Does this mean that the artwork of the Pop Art movement will last throughout art history despite the artists’ initial intentions of creating a disposable work of art? Have art historians taken away one of the primary qualities of Pop art by immortalizing what was possibly supposed to be a mortal image?
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