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 Instead, it celebrated the banal elements of popular culture. It was called Pop Art
“The term Pop Art refers to the interest a number of artists had in the images of mass media, advertising, comics, and consumer products. It coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and ‘60s, and though it came in a number of waves, all its adherents shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience.” (http://artchive.com/artchive/pop_art.html)
The Pop artists took inspiration from the use of everyday objects. They used any form of objective subject matter; nothing was taboo and nothing was off limits. The more commonplace, the better.
The two artists most closely associated with this movement are Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City in 1923. He began painting in high school and decided to pursue a career in fine arts at Ohio State University. After graduation, he worked as an engineering draughtsman, a commercial artist, and a university professor.
He had a few shows that were mildly successful, but his career took a radical and significant turn when one day his young son showed him a picture of Mickey Mouse and said, “I’ll bet you can't paint as good as that.”
He accepted the challenge and produced six paintings of characters from the comics, complete with lettering, word balloons, and the Benday dots used in commercial printing. He took his comic-strip paintings to the fashionable Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and they immediately accepted them for exhibition. His exhibit created a sensation in the art world and launched his career.
Lichtenstein restricted his palette to black, white, and the primary colors. He used thick black outlines and no shading except that provided by the dots. He intended his comic-strip paintings, with the characters in tense, dramatic situations, to be ironic commentaries on the ability of mass media to shape everything, even emotions.
 Andy Warhol was born in the late 1920s. The exact details of his birth are unknown because Warhol liked to shroud himself in mystery. “I never give my background, and anyway, I make it all up differently every time I'm asked.”
Warhol came to New York in 1949 after completing a traditional art degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He found work as a commercial artist while painting on the side. The critics ridiculed his paintings at his first showings, but by 1962, with Pop art in full swing, he finally received critical acclaim.
His art can be loosely paced in four categories: commercial products (Campbell's soup cans), celebrities (Marilyn Monroe), modes of exchange (Dollar bills), and disaster scenes (car crashes).
Warhol was a study in contradiction. A devout Roman Catholic who attended Mass nearly everyday, he was also a pornographer and a flagrant homosexual. The “Factory,” his New York studio, was the home to a vast coterie of drug addicts, transsexuals, avant-garde artists, drag queens, and general weirdoes. Warhol filmed many of his groupies during their frequent orgies and used the footage in his more than sixty film projects. These films became the forerunners of the pornographic film market of the 1970s and 1980s.
Warhol once described himself as a deeply superficial person. He said, “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.”
He once expressed the desire that they leave his tombstone blank with no epitaph and no name. After a brief consideration, he changed his mind, “Well, actually, I'd like it to say ‘figment.’”
Although he did not get his wish, it would have been a fitting epitaph for his work and the entire Pop Art movement.
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