Warhol’S Art Making Challenged Audiences to Consider the Connections Between Art and the World It Reflected.

Founded in the late 1950’s and early 60’s and imperative to the art movement referred to as “Pop Art”, Andy Warhol pioneered the concept of bringing commercial art into fine art. He incorporates the rising influence that the media, celebrities, advertising and new technologies had on the culture of his era and allows them to become the subject matter of an artwork by using new art-making techniques and challenging the audience to consider the connections between art and the world. By understanding Warhol’s   era, body of works as well as his art-making practice, the audience is able to bear witness to how Warhol stretches the definitions of the nature of art - of what it can be and how it can be made.
Pop Art mostly prominent in America was a response to Abstract Expressionism and was a period of radical change. It was a social and political turbulent time of counter-culture revolution that saw the uprise of the civil rights movement, the creation of woman rights, witnessed the assignation of John F. Kennedy as well as the resistance towards the Vietnam War. America also began to prosper after the Second World War in the 1960’s being the era that saw the upsurge of consumerism as well the phenomenon of the media which became of immense influence on society. With the objective to interlink the fine arts and the everyday, pop artists, in particular Warhol began to base their techniques, style and imagery on ideas and characteristics that reflected the 1960’s to create their artworks. Advertising dominated various places such as the streets, magazines and televisions and became highly associated with the American way of living becoming a tool to stir up consumer desire. It played on the idea of materialism and the desire to acquire the beautiful and the glamorous.   New technologies such as the television came of age and changed America’s experience of the world allowing media, more specifically film, fashion, music and celebrities influence the lives of Americans....