Two Hundred Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962

The dawn of the twentieth century ushered in what is known as a modern aesthetic. While encompassing a multitude of positions, modernism revered high Art, with a capital "A" Modernists exalted the uniqueness and rarity of great works of art. The irreproducible brushstrokes of masterpieces were the foundation of their value.

In the 1960's...Andy Wahrhol embraced mass media and popular culutre to invent "pop art." Perhaps more than any other artist, he emabodies the spirit of postmodernism. He was the first artist to create something radically different from high art for the edification of a few. He and other artists, such as Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, who followed his lead, liquidated the barrier between serious art and mass culture.

Warhol's art mirrors the attititude of mass media. His paintings reflect a sense of detachmnet, taking a spectator's perspective, as if viewing the world filtered through a TV. Disjointed images--Campbell's soup cans, Coke bottles...stutter across the screen.

Warhol's work exploits mass media and mass production. The themes of his art are the larger-than-life images the media create of the stars of the media. The more the stars are copied, the greater their value.

from Steven Holtzman's The Aesthetics of Cyberspace: Digital Mosaics

"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good."

-Andy Warhol

(Warhol, quoted in Jonathan Fineberg. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 1995.Fineberg, p.252)