America's Royal Family by David Patrick Deal. Part of the Fragile Pop series. Assemblage on canvas. 2009.
Pop artist including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauchenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Keith Herring elevate the ordinary image and manufactured product to art status in their commentaries about America’s obsession with beauty, popularity and tragedy. Pop art is born.
Today, Pop lives and morphs into electronic media. Facebook, Twitter, and Linked In build social media into a new way to relate to one another.
Recently, I held an opening of my art for friends in a recreation of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory: The studio and playground for the New York elite underground scene in the 1960′s.
Pop art challenged our views about what is art worthy. The Pop artists elevated ordinary products and images to the status of high art––blurring the lines between pedestrian and artistic. Through their commentaries on force feeding of repetitive imagery, they reveal how media desensitizes us to the beautiful, ugly and tragic. Our culture’s obsession with beauty and fame drives our buying decisions, celebrity fascinations and fashion sense. The Pop artist’s work imitates art which, in turn, imitates life in an endless dance of reality and fantasy. The next time you look at a soup can, or celebrity photo, or dollar bill, consider how many people have seen the exact same image, and how their need for this object drives their decisions every day. Everyone is longing for love, beauty and their 15 minutes of fame. And, if they get them and lose them, they become obsessed with getting more. Its an insatiable American hunger that the rest of the World loathes and admires simultaneously.
