Pixel
The pixel (derived from picture element) is the
smallest homogeneous element of an image. Its on-screen
attributes are luminosity, color, and blinking. The
resolution of a screen is determined by the number of
pixels per line and the total number of lines. Pop Art
The term "Pop Art" was used for the first time
by English critic Lawrence Alloway to characterize the
manifestations of popular culture (television,
advertising, magazines) that were considered inferior to
high culture. Alloway, who was a member of the
Independent Group that met sporadically at the Institute
for Contemporary Art in London, called for an art that
would reflect contemporary experience and popular
culture. He went on to organize two rallying exhibitions,
including "This Is Tomorrow"
(Whitechapel Gallery, 1956, where Richard Hamilton,
another member of the Independent Group, presented his
famous collage Just What Is It That Makes Today's
Homes So Different, So Appealing?, which anticipated
all the aspects of Pop Art. A second generation of
artists drawing their inspiration from media culture,
including Peter Blake, David Hockney, Richard Smith, and
Allen Jones, subsequently came to the forefront of the
English art scene. Around the same time in the United
States, Robert Rauschenberg proposed an alternative to
Abstract Expressionism with his combine-paintings
of diverse objects, while Jasper Johns, playing on
illusion and reality, repainted beer cans, targets, and
American flags. The real had entered art, and its most
trivial aspects, drawn from consumer culture, was to
occupy various artists working in New York, such as Claes
Oldenburg, with his deformations of functional objects
like telephones or toilet bowls, Roy Lichtenstein with
his borrowings from the comic strips, James Rosenquist
with his billboard montages of banal images, George Segal
with his lifesize plaster figures frozen in everyday
situations, Tom Wesselmann with his Great American
Nudes, and Andy Warhol with his multiples of
contemporary icons like the Coke bottle or Marilyn
Monroe. These artists worked with mechanical processes
such as photography or silkscreen, thus obtaining a flat
rendering that denied all subjective emotion. The
consumer industry adopted Pop Art as an antidote to the
rigidity of High Art. The term Pop, which spread to music
and fashion, corresponded to an entire way of life among
young people in the 1960s.
Bibliography: Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (New
York: Praeger, 1966). Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: An
International Perspective (New York: Rizzoli, 1992).
Portapak
The Portapak was the first light half-inch video unit,
launched on the American market by Sony in 1965. It
included a camera and a portable black-and-white tape
deck.Thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Nam
June Paik became the first artist to buy such a light
video unit. He inaugurated his brand-new Portapak by
taping the taxi ride from his New York studio to the
Café Au Go-Go, where, on 4 October 1965 he showed the
resulting tape accompanied by a text entitled
"Electronic Video Recorder."
Postmodernism
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the idea of
"postmodern" was applied to both the visual
arts and architecture. Postmodernism in the visual arts
constituted a reaction to modernist theory and a
rejection of the twentieth-century avant-gardes.
Modernism, notably as it was theorized by the American
art critic Clement Greenberg, may be defined as a
tendency to "use the specific methods of a
discipline to criticize that same discipline." The
criteria for a painting were thus flatness, the shape of
the canvas, and the properties of the paint. The work was
judged and determined by the internal logic of its
medium. The avant-garde had been rooted in a logic of
rupture and renewal throughout the twentieth century, and
Postmodernism was a reaction against this linear history
of art. Postmodern works were to draw freely on different
preexisting historical styles, making subjectivity an
essential criterion for judgment. The past became a
simple repertory of forms. The paintings of the Italian
Transavangardia and the architecture of Ricardo Bofill
are characteristic of this approach. Postmodernism in art
is a correlary of the Western way of life. In Le
Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Postmodern
explained to children), Jean-François Lyotard
writes: "When power is called capital rather than
the party, the Transavangardist or postmodern solution, .
. . seems more appropriate than the antimodern solution.
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary
culture--we listen to reggae, watch Westerns, eat
MacDonald's at lunchtime and local dishes at night, wear
Parisian perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong,
and knowledge is a subject for TV game shows. It is easy
to find a public for eclectic works of art. By becoming
kitsch, art flatters the reigning disorder of the
art-lover's taste. The artist, the dealer, the critic,
and the public delight in anything and everything; laxity
is the order of the day. But this realism of anything and
everything is that of money--for lack of aesthetic
criteria, it remains possible and useful to measure the
value of artworks by the profits they earn. This realism
adjusts to all trends, like capital adjusts to all needs,
as long as the trends and needs have buying power."
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