Pop art reflects the times. It is an expression of a society that puts less emphasis on breeding, formal education and even wealth than on presentation . . . It is a chic open to everyone, and qualifications for entry can be acquired as easily as learning the latest dance fad.
Thus, in 1965, the director of the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, Samuel Green, took the pratfall from the ivory tower in a preface to the world's first book on pop art, an emetically extravagant volume by a writer named John Rublowsky. Yet who today shall say he was not right? By 1965 pop had become the most popular movement in American art history, drenched in ballyhoo, gratefully supported by legions of collectors whose appetites bore the same relation to connoisseurship that TV dinners do to poulet en demi-deuil. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Indiana, Rosenquist, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Johns and Rauschenberg became instant household names, not counting their swarm of epigones. "What we have with the pop artists," wrote the English critic Lawrence Alloway, "is a situation in which success has been combined with misunderstanding." He had coined the term pop art, in England in 1957, "to refer approvingly to the product of the mass media." Appropriately, Alloway, whose fascination with mass culture as anthropology long predates the movement that he christened, has now organized a pop retrospective at Manhattan's Whitney Museum.
In a weird way, this show exhales as musty and involuntary a breath of vanished time as any revival of neoclassicism. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup can, once considered an icon of intimidating cool, has become a sort of madeleine. Irrevocably, the cachet of pop has gone, and many of its artifacts now look tenuous. It cannot be long before some enterprising museum (the Metropolitan?) opens a '60s Period Room, to go with its transplanted Louis Quinze paneling and reassembled colonial parlor: a Wesselmann and a Warhol Marilyn on the stainless-steel walls, a coffee table strewn with multiples and macadarnia nuts, a Panther poster above the vinyl settee, and under the supergraphic in the corner a waxwork group of Henry Geldzahler hustling that week's trend to a slim, wrinkled matron in bandoleers and Courrèges boots.
Pending such feats of instant nostalgia, all we are left with is the pictures. The crass cultural chauvinism and blatant flackery that surrounded and fed American pop have not by any means gone from the art scene, but they are muted. All the talk about how pop meant a democratization of the art experience, how it would obliterate the line between "art" and "life," has turned out to be the merest jive. It could hardly be expected to convince anyone in a world where Lichtensteins cost $50,000 apiece.
Systems and Signs. There is no longer any difficulty in seeing the best of pop as a mannered game with art language, rather than a vulgarian's assault on le beau et le bien. Ten years ago, Art Historian Robert Rosenblum predicted that "the initially unsettling imagery of pop art will quickly be dispelled by the numbing effects of iconographical familiarity, and ephemeral or enduring pictorial values will become explicit."