Pop Art and Design
Day: Saturday 7 April
Conveors
Anne Massey (Regents University London)
Alex Seago (Richmond, the American International University in London)
Session Abstract
This session takes as its subject the phenomenon of pop art and looks outwards from this genre in two ways. Firstly, it looks at pop art and its underplayed relationship with pop design. As art history and design history have evolved in separate ‘academic silos’, the links between the history of art and of design are therefore rarely explored. The dominant discourse of pop art is one which focusses on individual artists rather than on networks of influence and collaboration.
Looking outwards from pop art, the session aims to make new links between the history of art and the history of design in the western world. The second aim of the session is also to broaden the geographical spread of this debate, by examining the links between pop art and design within a global context. The session also explores the art and design links across different localities beyond the western world and asks, how did the links between pop art and design develop globally?
Speakers & Papers
Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) Instant Good Taste: Pop connoisseurs, habitat, and the aesthetics of expendability
Rodney Nevitt (University of Houston) Designing the Beatles: The pop album in the era of pop art
Oliver Peterson Gilbert (LCCM/Open University) ‘It’s going to be a fab, kandy-kolored leisure-living, kustom-built for comfort super-styled and slickline, bright new world.’ The Fine Artz Associates, Kustom Design and Fine Artz pedagogy in the 1960s
Sofia Gotti (Courtauld Institute of Art) The Only Way is Out of the Box: Politics or art for consumption? Buenos Aires, 1967–69 Remembering and Forgetting the