Monday, June 13, 2011

media-saturation

Considered as a whole, pop exemplifies a mixed response to mass culture: some examples appear to celebrate consumer products and media stars, while others indicate a critical, analytical response. The term 'pop art' encompasses a wide variety of paintings, sculptures, prints and collages produced by professional artists who used popular culture and mass media material as sources of iconography, techniques and conventions of representation. Pop art can be characterized as a meta-art or meta-language (a meta-language is any language used to talk about another language) in that it takes as its object of scrutiny not reality perceived directly but existing representations of reality and in the realms of graphic design, packaging, the cinema, etc. The fact that the pop artists did not follow the impressionists and work directly from nature is an acknowledgement that, for modem city dwellers, 'nature' - in the sense of fields, trees and mountains - has been almost completely replaced by a humanly constructed world of buildings, interiors, motorways, signs, posters, newspapers, magazines, films, radio broadcasts, television transmissions and computer simulations. In short, billions live in a media-saturated environment.

- John Walker


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