Obeying the occult rules of what's "in," decorous little teen-aged girls from fashionable Manhattan schools must this spring climb, white-sneakered, to the top spiral of the Guggenheim Museum. Low-voiced and appreciative, they stand there taking notes for essays on an enormous painting that has an all-over pattern of gooey brown and a row of real, 3-in. buttons running down the middle. It is called Coat. The girls do not laugh. Coat is pop art. And pop art, much as it may outrage Pop, not to mention Grandpop, is the biggest fad since art belonged to Dada. Symposiums discuss it; art magazines debate it; galleries compete for it. Collectors, uncertain of their own taste, find pop art paintings ideal for their chalk-walled, low-ceilinged, $125,000 co-op apartments in new buildings on Park Avenue. Even Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art has bought a pop art sculpture called Dual Hamburger.
Butterscotch Pie. Hamburger is an admirable choice; it embodies all the values of pop art—which is essentially a mild, unrebellious comment on the commonplace made by picturing it without any pretense of taste or orthodox technical skill. It is nothing new to transform nonart materials into works of art; but seldom have artists been so willing to forgo the transforming. They may paint a soup can and enlarge or repeat it; but the can remains a can, designed by the Campbell Soup Co. In defense, Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann says, "Objects like Coke bottles have powers. Brand products are here to stay." Ten, 20 or 50 years ago, any artist would have been snubbed from 5th Street to the Left Bank for such unimaginative, unintellectual literalism; most of the leaders of abstract expressionism can't swallow it; but profit-minded galleries and collectors of whatever's new are off and running with it.
Satire, or a bit of wit, might have given pop art a certain charm. But the pop artists do not expose the vulgar; they merely exploit it, down to the last pecan-covered butterscotch pie.
A group of British intellectuals, including Curator Lawrence Alloway of the Guggenheim Museum, coined the term pop art back in 1956 to describe how certain serious artists were incorporating images from TV, movies and other forms of popular art into their work. But until a few galleries began picking them up, U.S. pop artists were barely aware of one another. Today, they are the new bandwagon; and since the avant-garde public is so hungry for more and more avant, the pop artists are in the chips. Wesselmann can sell a collage for $2,500; a Claes Oldenburg Floorburger is priced at $2,000; and JarLes Rosenquist can fetch as much as $7,500 for a painting.
"It is the most important art movement in the world today." says Pop Art Collector Philip Johnson, whose architecture is the essence of elegance. ''It is a very sharp reaction against abstract expressionism, and as such, it is a great relief to see, because we recognize the pretty girls and the pop bottles." But Surrealist Painter Max Ernst, who belonged to the Dada movement, hoots down such paeans: "It is just some feeble bubbles of flat Coca-Cola, which I consider less than interesting and rather sad"