PROGRAM DE STUDII UNIVERSITARE DE MASTER: [309400]

UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREȘTI

FACULTATEA DE LITERE

PROGRAM DE STUDII UNIVERSITARE DE MASTER:

SOCIETATE, SPECTACOL ȘI MULTIMEDIA

LUCRARE DE DISERTAȚIE

București

Iunie 2018

UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREȘTI

FACULTATEA DE LITERE

PROGRAM DE STUDII UNIVERSITARE DE MASTER:

SOCIETATE, SPECTACOL ȘI MULTIMEDIA

FILOSOFIA ANILOR 60, O INSPIRAȚIE PENTRU PUBLICITATEA DE ASTĂZI

“THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE 60s, AN INSPIRATION FOR TODAY’s ADVERTISING SCENE”

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[anonimizat] a universal agreement that art is the formulation of something that is significant as well as adorable by using imagination. Consequently, art is subjective and the description of art has transformed over the years based on different habits.

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The relationship between art and advertising along the years has gone through various stages. When Nike utilized The Beatles song “Revolution” [anonimizat]. Their lawyer released a declaration that. “The Beatles’ [anonimizat], beer or anything else.” Thus, [anonimizat]. [anonimizat] 20th century has been closing the gap between art as well as advertising. At a [anonimizat] 1940s, we can see that Norman Rockwell drew graphics for Jell-O and Orange Crush and Warhol’s Campbell Soup paintings challenged both the universe of art and advertising.

The question it is then: what is the relationship between art and advertising? And let’s be more specific. We are not interested in this work in art in general, but in one artistic wave only. What is the relationship between the art of the 1960s and the advertising scene of today? How did the Pop Art movement influenced the advertising that we know today?

PART 1 | THE HISTORY OF POP ART MOVEMENT

POLITICAL, ECONOMICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE 1950s

IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Pop Art movement symbolizes the artistic expression of the prosperity era which followed the austerity period after the Second World War. According to Honor and Fleming, the current was born approximately in the same time, independently and separately in two different regions: The United Kingdom and the United States, but both talked about the same thing: American culture. The Pop Art of American artists represented their vision of how to live the American dream, and Pop Art of British artists was about the influences their country received from the American soil.

While in the United Kingdom the population was still struggling for a short period of time with post-war problems such as rationalizing food, in America people lived what we can call the glory era or the consensus culture, for reasons that we will discover later in the course of the present work. The period of the 1950s in the United States of America was characterized by prosperity and economic expansion. Between 1946 and 1960, America was developing economically, which lead to a rise in living standards and gross national product by up to 100%, which meant more than double. The main advantage of the economic growth was that their beneficiaries were also people from the middle class and not only the elite class. About 60% of them could say they enjoy what the government calls: middle-class living standards of living.

The image of the American dream was represented by the suburban area full of identical houses with green grass in front of them and happy people. The symbol came from the wave of suburbs that were created at that time in America (the number of houses built at that time doubled the number of existing ones). A key city of that time was the city of Levittown, where 10,000 homes were built and over 40,000 "happy" people moved around in the area overnight. The wave of migrations was later referred to as the "white flight".

American suburbs in the 1950s period

The phenomenon of suburbanization was beneficial to the construction industry. And because people were farther away from the city, they needed cars to get to the urban environment, and this was beneficial to the car industry. Until 1960, 80% of Americans could say that they were the proud owner of a car, and 14% of them even had two or more personal cars. Together with the increase in the number of cars per capita, we can also start to see changes in the shopping culture. The 1950s are marked by the emergence of first shopping malls and drive-through restaurants. Life rhythm began more alert, consumer goods started to stake possession of the average American consumer, who started to become a shopping addict that cannot stop him/herself from buying products and have false needs.

As Rutger Bergman puts it in his Utopia for realists book, when a society reaches a point in which every individual has its primary needs worked out, the society has two options in that moment of what to choose as an activity in the spare time left after work: leisure experiences or buying consumer goods. In our case, it is obvious that our society chose to spend its money and accumulate consumer goods.

The Fortune magazine at that time described the Americans as "a great mass…buy[ing] the same things – the same staples, the same appliances, the same cars, the same furniture, and much the same recreation”.

Together with the economic expansion, technology and mass media were also emerging. The population was starting to have access to TV, air conditioning and washing machines. 50% of American households owned a television, and it was becoming the home star as they consumed about six hours of television per day. The television and radio served as channels for marketing people to spread their messages. Until the mid-1950s, marketing departments in millions of companies spent $10 trillion a year to advertise their services or products.

From a cultural point of view, during the 1950s, mass culture began to dominate the United States of America. Before the time when television was in the homes of people, they were paying for what they were consuming. They went to theater, cinema, concerts, and every encounter with culture was costing them money. But once they got a TV, American households learned they could get the entertainment they had to pay for every time, now with just a monthly subscription. Thus, millions of people were connected between each other by watching the same TV program. That's why the culture of the TV was very kind with the general public. Television network directors wanted to reach as many audiences as possible, so they were trying to have programs that offend as few viewers as possible. But that did not mean that there was no room for diversity. The programs offered something for everyone. Those who were not Western film fans found their place watching biblical epics; for those who did not like comedies, there were questionnaire shows and so on.

The purpose of television employees was not to create programs that would please television viewers, but programs that brands would like in order to later pay for the little space between two shows. And brands always chose the more digestible programs that were watched by as many people as possible.

Serious dramas were played at first by top actors and written by the best writers such as Playhouse 90 or Kraft Television Theater. But these dramas resisted only during the time when only the people with high income had access to television. After the big mass of people began to buy a household TV, the shows began to look more like cheap middle-class dramas: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy or Ed Sullivan and Gunsmoke. People wanted to watch people who looked familiar (similar to them) or to whom they could have aspired, or at least that's what television directors thought. A perspective, embraced by educated viewers, was that television only pulled the whole population down with unsophisticated dramas, comedies or westerns. Another perspective could be that television brought the country together, making people closer.

There was an alienated culture growing under the influence of films like Rebel without a cause, The wild one or Blackboard jungle. James Dean became the symbol for all teenagers who were lost, unhappy and without any direction in life. Also, outside of Hollywood, an artistic movement led by The Beats group, formed around poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Jack Kerouac, took place. What is important to note is that this culture that was against the mass culture was very passive. Marlon Brando of The Wild One, Jack Kerouac's short story, did not have a target against which he revolted. He was rebellious because that was what nature called him to be. And just like the cultural wave around Rebel without a cause, The Beat Generation did not want to stir up a revolution or reform society. They rather wanted personal revelations. Their revolution was very much like the state of mind of the suburbs in front of the TV. Everyone was looking for happiness, only that in different ways and places.

From a musical point of view, before the arrival of rock and roll, during the 1950s, people listened at the same time to different genres coming from various cultures. People’s musical choices were influenced by the political beliefs from that time. As long as Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, there was peace and prosperity on American soil, that kind of peace in which whites were living in peace with the black people, and the effects of the Cold War did not feel so strong. At the beginning of the 1950s songs like Come On-My House, played by Rosemary Clooney; Do not Let The Stars Get in Your Eyes, played by Perri Como or How Much is That Doggie in the Window? by Patti Page were popular. The first to access the rock area was Bo Diddley with the hit Who do you love in 1956.

Later in the decade, folk music began to make a stand. Young people began to appreciate more authentic and simple music. They started choosing artists such as Harry Belafonte or The Kingston Trio, instead of modern music. This trend continued into the 1960s and had a big influence on performers like Bob Dylan. However, during the 1950s, the biggest event remained on February 22, 1956, when Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel. Much of his success came from the fact that he had carefully studied James Dean of Rebel without a cause, and he understood that gesture, sexuality, and attitude were as important as the music itself. In this case Elvis's music was often less important, the cultural change created by him coming more from the character he had created. That's why he was not allowed to be shot below his waist because his movements were considered too vulgar.

The characteristic culture of the 1950s gives rise to the controversial discussion that is even today valid: who is the one in control in the fight when choosing our TV programs – the TV directors or the consumer? Do TV directors run programs in order to control the population or they are choosing shows according to the public’s demand? The critics of the television talk about the fact that society is becoming the victim of a cultural conspiracy. Comic stripes corrupted the young, rock and roll encouraged the rebels' rebellion, while television numbed the critical thinking of the population. On the other hand, the freedom of choice says that mass culture gave mass audiences what they wanted, but nothing was forced on to the consumer. The public could always switch the dial, refuse to buy the record, or stay home from the movie theatre.

IN UNITED KINGDOM

Beyond the ocean, the situation was a little different. If for the Americans the 1950s could be called the golden era or the consensus culture, the same thing did not happen on the British soil. The society was still trying to recover after the war. The United Kingdom had consumed 6.6% of its gross domestic product for the defense of the country during the war, which was higher than all the countries involved in the war (but still no more than the amount consumed by the Soviet Union).

One decade after the war, though it was over, the political and financial situation of United Kingdom was unchanged. The British people faced the same state laws and high taxes like they were in the war period. Even the most common things worked after the "old rules". Food was still rationalized, and families with a big number of members had problems feeding their children. Butter, meat, tea, bread and coal were the main resources that demanded a great deal, and the British population had survival problems. The decision to continue the rationalization policy even in time of peace caused the same behavior as during the war to society. Families were producing their own food in the courtyard of the house or were receiving resources from their relatives abroad.

All the elements of British society in the 1950s were a proof that the thought of a consumerist life had not yet entered this society. Another problem was caused by the combination of war-related disasters, lack of male manpower and construction materials. The British population was experiencing a shortage in the category of urban housing. The British lived in rented small studios, in very poor conditions, without any little privacy or warmth that a home should have.

This situation, however, would have changed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The United Kingdom would become the urbanest and industrialized country in the world and therefore also the one with the highest degree of pollution, a situation in which United States of America was, as well, but during the 1930s. Coal was used both for heating houses, but also for generating energy, use that led to chronic atmospheric pollution that was detrimental to both people and buildings. The 1952 London Smog lasted 5 days and killed more than 4,000 people with heart or lung problems. In industrial areas, factories polluted both nearby air and groundwater that circulated in other areas of the country.

All this period and atmosphere was rendered by the painter L.S. Lowray documenting the Lancashire urban area.

L.S. Lowry – Going to the match (1953) L.S. Lowry – Huddersfield (1965)

Environmental pollution was the price that United Kingdom paid for its industrial success. Towards the end of the 1950s period, United Kingdom accounted for a quarter of global mass-produced products in factories. The United Kingdom was the world's first ship producer and the first in Europe to produce coal, steel, machinery and textiles.

All the industrial development could be seen in people’s way of living. Although they couldn’t afford themselves to have as many goods as the American population did, the standard of living of the British society grew considerably. The period of the 1950s was considered the golden period of transport industry in the United Kingdom. On the British roads, one out of three cars was a public transport vehicle or a truck. In the urban areas, simple public transports were replaced by electric trams and oil-fired buses. All this gave the population the opportunity to travel as much as possible at a very low price and to have the cheapest service. For example, during the 1950s it was the period in which the British population was given every day the necessary milk and coal to heat the household. The rationalization of oil was a measure of the past, so the British start to allow a personal car, but not at the same level as the Americans. The proportion was a car for 16 people, much less than the proportion of Americans where 80% of them could say that they were the owner of a personal car. Few British families could afford a personal car, so the alternative would be to use a motorcycle, a bicycle, or a public vehicle such as a bus, tram or train.

Industries that were based on science, such as electronics, engineering, and oil refineries, also had a very strong growth. Several symbols of the country's productions were represented by the excellence of Rolls Royce aviation engines and cars or the textile industry that came to the market with a new type of material: nylon. At the end of the 1950s, Leicester was the center of the stock industry and was the most prosperous city in Europe. Also during this period, another industry that underwent changes was agriculture. Tractors were introduced into everyday work, horses being replaced, and agriculture began to flourish.

In the 1950s in the United Kingdom certain industries were known as being dedicated only to men. But during the war period, since all the male force left for the war, the women kept their places. And now that the war was over, with all the man force back home, males started wanting their workplaces back, putting the women in the position to have the opportunity to work temporarily only until they built a family. From the moment they became wives, their work moved within the home. The housewives cared for the house to be permanently cleaned and warm: they started using the washer and the vacuum cleaner, and they spent most of their time in the kitchen where they cooked. The electronic product they lacked was the refrigerator, so they needed to spend a lot of time in the markets to get fresh products at all times. The custom of consumerism, in this case, had other logical roots and was not driven only by the desire to have as many products as possible.

Most shops were family businesses and were traditional. An average local market included: a butcher, a baker, a grocer, a herb, a confectioner, and a blacksmith. At this point, the structure of the market began to feel the need for more. Sainsbury was an alternative that offered good quality products at low prices, but it had not yet become what United States of America already had, a supermarket with self-service.

From a cultural point of view, the British society of the 1950s was very simple, and the entertainment part was locally oriented. The fun of the elderly or with a lower financial income consisted in meeting with neighbors, walking the dog or going out to a pint of beer in the local pub, which had more limitations than today. For example, these, as well as the shops, were closed on Sunday, the day being dedicated to lunches in the family and going to church together. Saturday, however, was for unmarried young people and their fun at local dance halls or cinema. The music they listened to was in the pre-rock-and-roll phase and had influences that came from the United States of America.

In terms of fashion trends, the British have not been influenced by Americans, the teddy boy style being an original creation of the young British male generation. The fashion of young girls also came with a unique creation, coming as a reaction to austerity during the war. Young girls wore the famous long new look skirts along with nylon tights.

Teddy boy – 50s British male fashion New look – British female fashion

The British media of the 1950s was largely dominated by the press. National newspapers were run by autocratic press barons and restricted trade unions. The most popular newspapers were The Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, which was much more qualitative as content, and Sunday newspapers such as News of the World, who were making rounds at the divorce courts for juicy stories. Newspapers were a more important news source than it is today, as BBC reports were far more restrictive than newspapers. For the majority of the population, the BBC was a mix of services provided by local radio and various forms of recreation. Among the forms of entertainment watched by the British population were dramas such as Under Milk Wood, thrillers such as Dick Barton Special Agentand comedies such as The Goon Show.

From a visual point of view, the British had their entertainment through movie theaters. In the 1950s, United Kingdom had about 5,000 cinemas that were spread all over the country. This period is known as "the golden age of British cinema films." Directors such as David Lean or Carol Reed and producers like Michael Balcon represented as much as possible the social character and the environment of the United Kingdom after the Second World War in their comedies.

The same could be said about children's cartoons. They watched Beano, Dandy, and American comics such as Superman, Batman or Captain Marvel. The most unique comic books of the time were Eagle and Girl. The first one was only talking to middle-class boys about science fiction, and the second was about boarding schools and ballet. Also, the children's literature is quite rich in this period, but it has the same character as during the war. With classic characters like Winnie-the-Pooh and Billy Hunter who kept their popularity even though the war had passed. The most popular author of children's books during this period was Enid Blyton with the help of the most liked character: Noddy, first appeared around 1949.

THE TRIGGERS THAT MADE POP ART MOVEMENT APPEAR IN EUROPE AND U.S.A

The "Pop Art" term was included in the mass culture by English critic Lawrence Alloway through the article The Arts and Mass Media in February 1958 published in the “Architectural Design and Construction” magazine. In the article, Lawrence does not use the “Pop Art” term as it is known today but talks about mass culture and how it has come to change its significance under the pressure of the general public. The term “Pop Art” is the abbreviation of popular art, which was used to refer to media products and not to works of art inspired by popular culture. This meaning, that we know today of the “Pop Art” term, will only get it in the early 1960s.

The Pop Art cultural movement started in the United Kingdom in mid-1950s and in the United States of America at the end of the same decade. For the United States, the Pop Art cultural wave represented the expression of prosperity that followed the Second World War. And, just as in the United States of America, in United Kingdom, the current is also born thanks to a period of prosperity that has grazed years of austerity after the war. Here, the movement was prepared by The Independent group.

The Independent Group was founded in 1952 in London and was made up of painters, architects, sculptors and art critics. Some big names can be listed: painters – Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi; Reyner Banham – historian and art critic; architect Peter Smithson and photographer Henderson Nigel. They opposed both the modernist directions of culture as well as the traditionalist conceptions of art. The group's discussions focused on ideas to involve advertising, films, product design, comics, science fiction, and technology with popular culture.

The first meeting of the group was conducted by Eduardo Paolozzi at the London Institute of Contemporary Art, where he came and presented his series of collages called Bunk. The collages contained objects found during his time in Paris between 1947 and 1949; commercials, comic characters, magazine covers, and table graphics, which featured American popular culture. Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, William Turnbull and art critic Lawrence Alloway also attended the meeting. This is the moment where the “pop” word first appears. Eduardo Paolozzi is the first to use the “pop” word in an artistic context, namely in the painting I was a rich man's plaything. The painting is made using the collage technique and next to the “pop” word we can also find: the cut-out picture of a pin-up girl, the Coca-Cola logo and a cherry pie.

I was a rich man’s plaything (1945); Meet the people (1948); Dr. Pepper (1948)

Eduardo Paollozi – Bunk

After Eduardo Paollozi's meeting at the 1952 Institute of Contemporary Art, the “pop” term is starting to become more and more popular. Since 1954, John McHale, one of the founders of the Independent Group and the Contemporary Art Institute, begins to use the “Pop Art” term, although credits for this phrase are attributed to Lawrence Alloway in the article from 1958 – “The Arts and the Mass Media”. Inspired by Eduardo Paolozzi's collages, Peter Blake creates, in 1955, the painting that would become one of the iconic paintings of Pop Art movement. On the balcony of Peter Blake, at first sight, seems to be a collage. This is actually a painting that reflects a number of characters that are holding iconic works of art.

Peter Blake – On the balcony (1955)

The first major exhibition in the field takes place in 1956 at Whitechapel Art Gallery and it is titled This is tomorrow. Here, the artists draw the basic themes of Pop Art movement such as advertising, media, as well as the amalgamation of various artistic disciplines and means of expression into one piece of art.

From the exhibition, Richard Hamilton receives the greatest attention with his collage entitled Just what is it that makes today's so different, so appealing? In a modern interior, a stereotypical pair is shown: a bodybuilder holding a huge lollipop on which we spot the “pop” inscription and a stripper on the couch. In this collage, there are the points of interest typical of Pop Art, namely: the collage technique, advertising, allusions to the sexual sphere, attractiveness to stereotypes, spectacles rooms and comic books, all in a specific, surprising atmosphere, from which humor is not lacking, resulting precisely from this mixture of genres and species.

Richard Hamilton – Just what is it that makes today’s so different, so appealing? (1956)

In 1957, Richard Hamilton defines the characteristics of Pop Art movement. He considers an object to be part of the Pop Art movement if it is: transient, expandable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty and sexy.

The first encounter with the reality that the group has is through the Young contemporaries exhibition of 1961, which also marks the start of the Pop Art movement in the United States of America. David Hockney, Allen Jones and Peter Philips are also exhibiting at this exhibition. Compared to the United States, in the United Kingdom, the current was less brutal. It reflects a state of being romantic, nostalgic.

In the United States, the emergence of Pop Art has been viewed as a reaction to abstract expressionism as in its beginnings the artists were turning their backs to the art in a figurative way, introducing the drawing and working with the brush technique in an impersonal manner. The art movement’s intention was to dynamite the seriousness of art and to use the reproduction of the banalest objects, the style that had been found before through the found objects of Marcel Duchamp’s art statements.

Fountain (1917); Bicycle wheel (1951) – Marcel Duchamp

During the 1950s, the artists who dominated the New York art scene were Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenbeg. They revealed to American artists a vast array of themes: beer cans, collages and paintings combined with Coca-Cola bottles, padded birds, and cut photos from newspapers and magazines. Although they have taken up these subjects, Pop artists preferred commercial techniques instead of the real painting of Johns or Rauschenberg.

DESCRIPTION OF 10 ICONIC ARTISTS OF THE POP ART MOVEMENT

In order to better understand the Pop Art movement, a review of the most iconic artists is recommended. The most important artists from the period Pop Art started with the New York artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, all of whom drew on popular imagery and were actually part of an international phenomenon. Following the popularity of the Abstract Expressionists, Pop’s reintroduction of identifiable imagery was a major shift for the direction of modernism. The subject matter became far from traditional “high art” themes of morality, mythology and classic history. Rather, Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop Art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art.

ANDY WARHOL

Andy Warhol was an American artist born on August 6, 1928. He was a director and producer and was a leading figure in the visual art movement called Pop Art. In his works, he explored the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertising and it flourished by the 1960s. His work spanned a variety of media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film and sculpture. Silk-screening was a printing technique where a mesh was used to transfer ink onto a substrate, except in the areas made impermeable to the ink, by a blocking stencil.

He was born and raised in Pittsburgh and initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. He began receiving recognition as an influential and controversial artist after exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy patrons. It quickly became one of New York City’s premier cultural hotspots. In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground, and founded the “Interview” magazine. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. He died of Cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58, after a gallbladder surgery. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburg, holds an extensive permanent collection of his art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.

In his early career in the 1950s, when he graduated from college with his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Warhol dedicated his career to commercial and advertising art, where his first commission had been to draw shoes for “Glamour” magazine in the 1940s. He somehow gave each show a temperament of its own, but the shape and style came through accurately and the buckle was always in the right place. Warhol’s whimsical ink drawings of show advertisements figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York.

Andy Warhol used the silk-screen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. While working in the shoe industry, he developed his “blotted line” technique, which was applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet, which was similar to a printmaking process on the most rudimentary scale. His use of tracing paper and ink allowed him to repeat the basic image and to create endless variations on the theme, a method that prefigured his 1960s silk-screen canvas.

In the late 1950s, Warhol began devoting more attention to painting, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "Pop Art" – paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell's soup cans. These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time.

Andy Warhol – Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)

British artist Richard Hamilton described Pop Art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business." As Andy Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again." Warhol's other famous Pop Art paintings depicted Coca-Cola bottles, vacuum cleaners and hamburgers.

He also painted celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colors. His most famous subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Mao Zedong. As these portraits gained fame and notoriety, Warhol began to receive hundreds of commissions for portraits from socialites and celebrities. His portrait Eight Elvises eventually resold for $100 million in 2008, making it one of the most valuable paintings in world history. Andy Warhol, who clearly relished his celebrity, became a fixture at infamous New York City nightclubs like Studio 54 and Max's Kansas City. Commenting on celebrity fixation — his own and that of the public at large — Warhol observed, "more than anything people just want stars." He also branched out in new directions, publishing his first book, Andy Warhol's Index, in 1967.

In 1968, however, Andy Warhol's thriving career almost ended. He was shot by Valerie Solanas, an aspiring writer and radical feminist, on June 3rd. Warhol was seriously wounded in this attack. Solanas had appeared in one of Warhol's films and was reportedly upset with him over his refusal to use a script she had written. After the shooting, Solanas was arrested and later pleaded guilty to the crime. Warhol spent weeks in a New York hospital recovering from his injuries and underwent several subsequent surgeries. As a result of the injuries he sustained, he had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life.

In the 1970s, Warhol continued to explore other forms of media. He published such books as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) and Exposures. Warhol also experimented extensively with video art, producing more than 60 films during his career. Some of his most famous films include Sleep, which depicts poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours, and Eat, which shows a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes.

Warhol also worked in sculpture and photography, and in the 1980s, he moved into television, hosting Andy Warhol's TV and Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes on MTV. Andy Warhol's life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol's focus on consumer goods and pop culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized.

Warhol spoke to this apparent contradiction between his life and work in his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, writing that "making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art."

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Roy Lichtenstein was also an American artist born in October 27th 1923 in New York in an upper-middle class Jewish family. He first became interested in art and design as a hobby, through school. He frequently drew portraits of the musicians playing their instruments. He then left New York to study at the Ohio State University, which offered studio courses and a degree in fine arts. His studies were interrupted by a three-year stint in the Army during and after World War II. He returned to studies in Ohio under the supervision of one of his teachers, Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his future work. He entered the graduate program at Ohio State and was hired as an art instructor for the next ten years.

He had his first solo exhibition in the early 1950s and moved to Cleveland in the same period where he undertook various jobs such as draftsman or window decorator in between periods of painting. His work during that time fluctuated between cubism and expressionism. In the late 1950s, he moved back to New York and began teaching again. It was at this time that he adopted the abstract expressionism style. Around that time, he began to incorporate hidden images of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny into his abstract works.

In the early 1960s he began his first pop paintings using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase continued up to the mid-1960s and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking.

His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Ben-Day dots was Look Mickey. This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said I bet you can’t paint as good as that. The Ben-Day dots method was a method used by newspapers and comic strips to denote gradients and texture and his work mimicked the mechanical technique with his own hand on a much larger scale.

Roy Lichtenstein – Look Mickey (1961)

He was a leading figure in establishing the Pop Art movement. Popeye was one of the very first Pop paintings that Lichtenstein created in the summer of 1961. At a later stage he would begin to focus on the generic human figures that appeared in cartoons of the period, but, early on, he chose immediately recognizable characters such as Mickey Mouse and Popeye.

The work is also distinct in being one of the last in which Lichtenstein actually signed his name on the surface of the picture; critic Michael Lobel has pointed out that he seems to have done so with increasing uncertainty in this piece, combining it with a copyright logo that is echoed in the form of the open tin can above it. Some have suggested that Popeye's punch was intended as a sly response to one of the reigning ideas in contemporary art criticism that a picture's design should make an immediate visual impact. Whereas most believed this should be achieved with abstract art, Lichtenstein here demonstrated that one could achieve it just as well by borrowing from low culture.

Roy Lichtenstein – Popeye (1961)

In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein gained renown as a leading Pop artist for paintings sourced from comic books, specifically DC Comics. Although artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had previously integrated popular imagery into their works, no one hitherto had focused on cartoon imagery as exclusively as Lichtenstein. His work, along with that of Andy Warhol, heralded the beginning of the Pop Art movement, and, essentially, the end of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant style.

Lichtenstein did not simply copy comic pages directly. He employed a complex technique that involved cropping images to create entirely new, dramatic compositions, as in Drowning Girl, whose source image included the woman's boyfriend standing on a boat above her. Lichtenstein also condensed the text of the comic book panels, locating language as another, crucial visual element; re-appropriating this emblematic aspect of commercial art for his paintings further challenged existing views about definitions of "high" art.

Roy Lichtenstein – Drowning girl (1963)

Lichtenstein expanded his use of bold colors and Ben Day dots beyond the figurative imagery of comic book pages, experimenting with a wide variety of materials. His landscape pictures are a particularly strong example of this interest. Lichtenstein made a number of collages and multi-media works that included motors, metal, and often a plastic paper called Rowlux that had a shimmery surface and suggested movement. By re-appropriating the traditional artistic motif of landscape and rendering it in his Pop idiom, Lichtenstein demonstrated his extensive knowledge of the history of art and suggested the proximity of high and low art forms. His interest in modern art also led Lichtenstein to create many works that directly referenced artists such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse.

He was a prolific printmaker throughout his career, and his prints played a substantial role in establishing printmaking as a significant art form in the 1960s. Brushstrokes, one such print, reflects his interest in the importance of the brushstroke in abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionist artists had made the brushstroke a vehicle to directly communicate feelings; Lichtenstein's brushstroke made a mockery of this aspiration, also suggesting that though abstract expressionists disdained commercialization, they were not immune to it – after all, many of their pictures were also created in series, using the same motifs again and again. Lichtenstein has said, "The real brushstrokes are just as pre-determined as the cartoon brushstrokes."

Drowning Girl and Look Mickey are regarded as his most influential works of that period. His most expensive piece is Masterpiece which was sold for $165 million in January 2017. He died in New York on the 29th of September 1997.

Roy Lichtenstein – Masterpiece (1962)

JAMES ROSENQUIST

James Rosenquist was born in North Dakota, United States of America in 29th of November 1933. He grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota and at the age 14 he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art. He continued his studies up to 1954 and in 1955, having received a scholarship to the Art Students League, he moved to New York City. He supported himself by working as a billboard painter, later using the leftover billboard paint to create small abstract paintings in the manner of the reigning New York school style. It was not until 1960 that he abandoned Abstract Expressionism to directly engage the techniques and iconography of his commercial work.

He was one of the seminal figures of the Pop Art movement, who took as his inspiration the subject and style of modern commercial culture. Through a complex layering of such motifs as Coca-Cola bottles, kitchen appliances, packaged foods, and women’s lipsticked mouths and manicured hands, Rosenquist’s large canvases and prints embody and comment on the dizzying omnipresence of the consumer world. He enjoyed the effect of using a billboard style of painting on smaller canvases, where the images became softly blurred and their literal quality was lost in the close-up orientation and the cropping of the image. He also played with shifts in scale and technique employing, for example, grisaille and full colors and juxtaposed a number of disparate motifs in a single canvas.

Rosenquist’s array of signs sometimes suggested an overriding sexual or political theme. In the 1960s he made more overtly political work, epitomized by the monumental wraparound painting F-111 in 1965, a canvas in 51 pieces that places American goods against the backdrop of a military fighter-bomber. It was one of the largest and most ambitious works in his collection. The painting initially was intended to cover all four walls of the main room within the Castelli gallery in Manhattan, occupying the entirety of each wall without any kind of visual relief, to cast an imposing, continuous view of the war. Painted during the Vietnam War, F-111 contrasts pictures from the war with commercial imagery from advertisements, showing tires, a cake, light bulbs, a girl in a salon hairdryer, bubbles, and spaghetti.

James Rosenquist – F-111 (1965)

Rosenquist juxtaposes the imagery from the ads against the plane as a way to imply graphic scenes from the war, with broken light bulbs near the cockpit mirroring bombs dropping from the plane, and the hood of the hairdryer echoing the look of a missile. Rosenquist uses the painting to question the role of marketing and coverage of the war describing the plane as "flying through the flak of consumer society to question the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising".

In addition to painting, Rosenquist contributed to the renewal of printmaking in the United States when in 1965 he and a number of other young artists explored the process of lithography at Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip, Long Island, New York. He was one of the most influential artists within the Pop Art genre. From the late 1950s, he was instrumental, together with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, in establishing Pop Art as a movement, perceptibly altering the concept of visual art.

Among much else, he is known for his monumental formats which he embarked on in the 1950s and 1960s. He became particularly well-known for the use of visual advertising techniques and images repurposed for his fine art career in the 1960s and the huge billboard-size paintings he began creating in the 1970s. Some of his works stand three to five meters tall and measure ten meters in length with one even exceeding 27 meters. In 1960, he rented a studio in a building in lower Manhattan that housed several artists who also became well known, including Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin.

He became friend with other artists working nearby, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsburg were leading figures in American literature during this time while Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Thelonious Monk were predominant on the entertainment and jazz scene in the circles frequented by Rosenquist.

Before renting the studio in lower Manhattan to focus on his fine art career, Rosenquist had worked as a commercial artist in Brooklyn and Manhattan painting the same motifs over and over. In his own words: “I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn. I got so I could paint a Schenley whiskey bottle in my sleep”.

Rosenquist died at his home in New York City on the 31st of March in 2017, after a long illness. He was 83 years old.

CLAES OLDENBURG

Claes Oldenburg was born on the 28th of January 1929 in Stockholm Sweden. He is an American sculptor best known for his public art illustrations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife Coosje van Bruggen. He still lives and works in New York.

Claes Oldenburg – Spoonbridge and cherry (1985 – 1988)

After moving to Chicago in 1936 where he grew up, he studied literature and art history at Yale University up to the early 1950s. He then returned to Chicago where he took classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. In the mid-1950s he moved to New York and got a job at the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration where he also took the opportunity to learn more, on his own about the history of art.

He worked for several years there and held his first one person exhibition in 1959, consisting of figurative drawings. It was there that he discovered the imaginary architecture envisioned by the 18th-century Romantics, and the construction and installation of the Statue of Liberty, sources that inspired his own whimsical drawings for monuments, and later public sculpture.

1960 was a breakthrough year for Oldenburg. The Yale graduate appeared, covered in garbage, with Patty Mucha (whom he later married) in his piece Snapshots from the City, inspired by the neighborhood and staged at Judson Memorial Church. Inspired by the smorgasbord of sights and sounds in life and art in Lower Manhattan, he collaborated with Mucha on other performances, and produced his first soft sculptures. Traces of the rough-hewn, graffiti-like collages of Rauschenberg and anti-artisanal Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet can be seen in Oldenburg's ripped, scribbled cardboard figures, objects, and signs from that year. They were an explicit, down and dirty take based on his own observations of the neighborhood, and were displayed in his Lower East Side storefront studio The Street. Several works from this show sold.

His follow-up studio exhibition, The Store, inspired by the bodegas and immigrant businesses in the generally run-down and marginalized immediate area, was even more commercially successful.

Also in 1960 (preceding Warhol's Factory by two years) Oldenburg began calling his studio the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company and produced bulbous, crudely-fashioned "ray guns," imitations of generic sci-fi weapons for display in his rented storefront. He also collected toys and kitsch objects that he displayed alongside these sculptures in installations. The Store caught the attention of the high-profile Green Gallery on 57th Street, where Oldenburg displayed his three colossal sculptures Floor Cake, Floor Cone, and Floor Burger, sculptures in stuffed, painted and sewn canvas, in 1962.

Claes Oldenburg – Floor Cake, Floor Cone and Floor Burger (1962)

From then on his work received significant acclaim, and for the next few years his production of "soft" convenience foods and domestic objects was prolific and varied: sandwiches, fries spilling out of the to-go packet, a hot water bottle, telephones and toilets, and other kitchen utensils and mass-manufactured household items. Characterized by a fluid hand, his works on paper remained an important, ongoing aspect of his career.

Over the second half of the 1960s, he began to produce an extensive series of drawings of fantasy architecture, which led to prints and later, public monuments. Also during the late 1960s, he established a long-term affiliation with pre-eminent art dealer Leo Castelli, who supported his ambition to produce work on a monumental scale. Oldenburg's influences splinter off in numerous directions, touching an array of artists and movements that seem unrelated, in accordance with the subtlety and multi-valent meaning of his work. Comfort food, his life-long obsession, is perhaps the ultimate symbol for inconsolable loneliness.

First-generation feminists noticed this, and Niki de Saint-Phalle and Lynda Benglis were among the first sculptors drawn to his pliant, expressive forms which they emulated to some extent in their early work. His art’s bright color, oversized scale, and unabashed appeal to the viewer influenced a generation of subsequent contemporary sculptor focused on manipulating scale, placement and texture of everyday objects, among them Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Robert Rauschenberg was born on October 22nd 1925 in Texas, United States of America. He was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop Art movement.

He was well known for his Combines of the 1950s in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg picked up trash and “found” objects that interested him on the streets of New York City and brought these back to his studio where they could become integrated into his work.

He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.” "He was both a painter and a sculptor and the ‘Combines’ are a combination of both. He also worked with photography, printmaking, paper making and performance.”

Robert Rauschenberg – Combine (1954-1964)

He began studying pharmacy at the age of 16 at the University of Texas and was drafted into the US Navy in 1943-1945. He subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met the painter Susan Weil, where they both decided to attend the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There he met his painting instructor Josef Albers who was the founder of the Bauhaus. His preliminary courses relied on strict disciplines that did not allow for any Uninfluenced experimentation. Soon he left for New York to make it as a painter. There, in all the chaos and excitement of the city life, he realized the full extent of what he could bring to painting. Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting.

By 1958, at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his work had moved from abstract painting to drawings like Erased De Kooning, to what he termed Combines. These combines cemented his place in art history. Robert Rauschenberg was fascinated by Willem de Kooning, and in 1953 asked the artist if he could erase one of his drawings as an act of art. The work that was created then has become a legend. Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing has been hailed as a landmark of postmodernism because of its subversive appropriation of another artist’s work, and it has also been understood as a rejection of the traditional practice of drawing as the foundation of painting. It was also a literal act of iconoclasm – so typical for our times now.

Robert Rauschenberg – Erased de Kooning (1953)

One of his first and most famous combines was entitled Monogram and consisted of an unlikely set of materials such as a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a show, a tennis ball and paint. This pioneering work altered the course of modern art. The idea of combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work.

Robert Rauschenberg – Monogram (1955-59)

As Pop Art emerged in the 1960s, he turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. He transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation. These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s he continued the experimentation in prints by printing onto aluminum moving Plexiglas disks, clothes and other surfaces. He challenged the view of the artist as auteur by assembling engineers to help in the production of pieces technologically designed to incorporate the viewer as an active participant in the work. He also created performance pieces technologically designed to incorporate the viewer as an active participant in the work. He also created performance pieces centered on change. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his experimentation continued, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs.

He died on May 12th 2008 in Florida of heart failure after a personal decision to go off life support.

RICHARD HAMILTON

Richard Hamilton was born in London on February 24th 1922. He was an English painter and collage artist. Despite having left school with no formal qualifications, he managed to gain employment as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm, where he discovered his ability for draughtsman ship and began to do painting at evening classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art and at the Westminster School of Art.

In 1938 he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Arts but was expelled in 1946 on grounds of “not profiting from the instruction”. Loss of his student status forced him to carry out National Service. After two years at the Slade School of Art, University College, London he began exhibiting his work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts where he also produced posters and leaflets. He taught at the Central School of Art and Design from 1952 until 1966.

Richard Hamilton was an artist whose considerable ambition was to "get all of living" into his work. In his epoch-making collage of 1956, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, the living space is crowded with up-to-the-minute objects of desire: the TV set, the vacuum cleaner, the tinned ham, the tape recorder, the body builder's muscles, the cone-shape coolie hat perched on the sexy naked housewife on the sofa. Hamilton's consumer's catalogue is well observed and playful. But at a more profound level it is horribly disquieting. No other work of art of its period expresses so precisely the jarringly ambivalent spirit of the age.

In the United Kingdom in that early postwar era there was a sudden thrilling influx of sophisticated, streamlined consumer goods from the United States. It was bonanza time for British home appliances, too, as the government-supported Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council) campaigned to improve standards in British manufacturing and a new breed of industrial designers emerged from British art schools. In 1956, exactly coinciding with Hamilton's collage, the Design Centre opened in the Haymarket, a heaven for aspirational homemakers. There was even a royal seal of approval when Prince Philip's inaugural prize for elegant design was awarded to the Prestcold Packaway refrigerator.

That Hamilton was anti-capitalist is an understatement. But he still adored the uninhibited plenty of American culture that he devoured and then recycled the imagery of popular American magazines. He spoke of this as "plundering the popular arts". By popular arts, Hamilton emphatically did not mean the folk arts, which turned him very squeamish.

The neo-romantics, the Kitchen Sink School and the St Ives artists were similar bêtes noires. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group, an offshoot of the by then more elderly and settled Institute of Contemporary Arts. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court in 1956. Young Independent Group members were the angriest of the art world, the gang was described by one member as "small, cohesive, quarrelsome, abusive".

Hamilton's wife Terri developed a technique at meetings of responding to ideas she disapproved of by standing up and miming the pulling of a lavatory chain. Besides the Hamiltons and Smithsons, the Independent Group included the artist Eduardo Paolozzi, the photographer Nigel Henderson, the critic Reyner Banham, the architect Jim Stilring and the architecture student Cedric Price. They worked in the expectation of change. Hamilton was crucially involved in the Independent Group's collaborative exhibition This Is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in London, in August 1956. It marked the first appearance of Just What Is It, which was used both as an illustration for the catalogue and a poster for the exhibition.

Hamilton was also largely responsible for the Fun House installation that veterans of This is Tomorrow remember as the sensation of the show. Fun House was an immersive experience affecting all the senses. Within the architect John Voelcker's outer structure Hamilton assembled a visually provocative collection of images from advertising, movies and comics as well as more conventional fine art. In retrospect, it may seem obvious that Hamilton's Fun House had a serious purpose in exploring the complexities of visual perception and in extending the boundaries of art. It is clear that it had considerable influence not just on Cedric Price's architectural “fun palace" concepts of the early 1960s but also on the coming riot of psychedelic "happenings".

Richard Hamilton – Fun House (1956)

Hamilton's art contained the shock of the eclectic. His all-embracing attitudes caused widespread puzzlement. He challenged the traditional hierarchy of values, the purist view held by the British art establishment of what was a proper subject matter for a work of art.

Hamilton was a knowledgeable, deeply serious artist who loved and respected the great artists of the past. But he was also determinedly responsive to the modern. There is a growing tendency to denigrate the 1960s as an overblown period when nothing of significance actually happened. Hamilton, of all people, knows this is not so. He made wonderful work through the whole of his long lifetime. But it is his art of those early postwar decades when the look and feel of the United Kingdom was changing fundamentally. He died on 13th of September 2011 at the age of 89.

SIR PETER THOMAS BLAKE

Sir Peter Thomas Blake is an English pop artist born in Kent on the 25th of June 1932. He is best known for cocreating the sleeve design for The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

He was educated at the Gravesend Technical College school of Art and the Royal College of Art. During the late 1950s he became one of the best known British pop artists. His paintings from that time included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment and wrestlers, often including collaged elements. Blake was included in group exhibitions and had his first solo exhibition in 1960.

Peter Blake's early work is dominated by two major subjects: fantastic scenes from the world of the circus and naturalistic paintings with autobiographic elements. The imitation of the popular image world of event posters, which Blake combined with portraits, was typical of his work. Circus characters and children reading comic books are among the artist's typical motifs.

In style and content, both types of pictures paved the way for English Pop Art. Thanks to a Leverhulme scholarship, Peter Blake had the opportunity to travel through Europe from 1956 to 1957, where he acquainted himself with the artistic trends of the time. In 1959, inspired by reproductions by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Blake began to paint collage-like pictures of pop musicians and film stars and to produce assemblages made of recycled material, postcards and other items.

Alongside his collages Blake also worked with the medium of imitation: painted collages, imitated pin-up-boards and locker doors, enlarged, painted postcard motifs and painted adaptations of posters appeared. The cover design for the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was one of his greatest successes.

Sir Peter Thomas Blake – Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

In 1975 Peter Blake was one of the founding members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. His imagery changed under the influence of this group of artists and his rural surroundings in Wellow on Avon. The members expected life in the country to provide them with new artistic impulses and moral renewal. Just like the pre-Raphaelites, they strove for an aesthetic permeation of all parts of life. Childhood memories, fairy tales and elves, depicted in a realistic style using techniques of the old masters, became his favorite subjects. On the Balcony (1955) and Self Portrait with Badges (1962) are two important works for the artist, reflective of his early painterly style and transition into later Pop Art works like Babe Rainbow (1968).

Sir Peter Thomas Blake – On the balcony (1955), Self Portrait with Badges (1962)

He was awarded the titled of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1983 and received a Knighthood in 2002 for his services to the visual arts. He currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. The artist’s works are included in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, among others.

DAVID HOCKNEY

David Hockney was born on the 9th of July in Bradford England in 1937. He was a painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. An important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.

He attended the Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London where he was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries alongside with Peter Blake. He was associated with the Pop Art movement but his early works display expressionist elements. He moved to Los Angeles in 1964, where he was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium using vibrant colors.

David Hockney – Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971)

He lived back and forth among LA, London and Paris in the late 1960s to 1970s. David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967. In We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961), red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem.

David Hockney – We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961)

In California, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine.

Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photo collages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process. The artist’s oeuvre ranges from collaged photography and opera posters, to Cubist-inspired abstractions and plain-air paintings of the English countryside. Often returning to a certain motif again and again, he probes the manifold ways one can see an image or a space. Hockney’s exploration of photography’s effect on painting and everyday life is evinced in his hallmark work A Bigger Splash (1967).

David Hockney – A bigger splash (1967)

“In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time,” he has explained.

A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium—including full-scale opera set designs, prints, and drawings using cutting-edge technology such as fax machines, laser photocopiers, computers, and even iPhones and iPads.

In 2017, the artist was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective which opened to critical acclaim at the Tate Gallery in London. Hockney’s works are presently held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

ELAINE FRANCES STURTEVANT

Elaine Frances Sturtevant was born on the 23rd of August in 1924 in Lakewood Ohio. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Iowa followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. She also studied at the Art Students League in New York.

Sturtevant's earliest known paintings were made in New York in the late 1950s. In these works, she sliced open tubes of paint, flattened them, and attached them to canvas. Most of these works contain fragments from tubes of several colors of paint, some have additional pencil scribbles and daubs of paint.

She was close friends with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and in 1964 by memorization only, she began to manually reproduce paintings and objects created by her contemporaries with results that can immediately be identified with an original, at a point that turned the concept of originality on its head. Warhol gave Sturtevant one of his silk-screens so she could produce her own versions of his Flowers paintings. Rauschenberg commissioned Sturtevant to paint a reproduction, which was subsequently incorporated into the combine.

Elaine Frances Sturtevant – Warhol Flowers (1965)

Sturtevant's works are not merely copies, since her aim was not to achieve an exact replica. Instead, she reconstructed them from memory, using the same techniques as the artists whom she imitated. Key to her thinking was the relationship between repetition and difference: the difference from the original forces one to look beyond the surface. She achieved these crucial differences through working by hand, without recourse to mechanical reproduction of any kind. As she said: "The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place."

For more than five decades, Sturtevant explored what she described as "the silent power of art", probing beyond art's surface appearance to expose its underlying conceptual structure and to "trigger thinking". When she moved from the United States of America to Paris in 1990, it was something of an escape. By this time, many European museums had devoted shows to her work, while in her own country, people reacted with irritation or misunderstanding to her approach – including some of the artists whose work she repeated.

In 2000 Sturtevant began to embrace film and video, advertising and internet-based images, producing work that reflects the fragmented and pervasive nature of our image-saturated culture. Recently, there has been a massive resurgence of interest in her work in museums across the world, with shows at venues including the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (1992); the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2004); the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2010), the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); the Kunsthalle, Zurich (2012) and the Serpentine Galleries, London (2013).

Her new popularity is easily explained: in the internet age there is a greater understanding of her extraordinary creativity with borrowed imagery. She died on May 7th 2014 in Paris where she had been living and working since the early 1990s. She was 89 years old.

SIGMAR POLKE

Sigmar Polke was born in Oels Silesia on 13th of February 1941. He was a German painter and photographer. He experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. He fled with his family to Thuringia in 1945 during the expulsion of Germans after World War II. Upon his arrival in West Germany, he began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory in Dusseldorf between 1959-1960 and at the age of 20 he entered the Dusseldorf Arts Academy. There he was deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys and he began his creative output during a time of enormous social, cultural and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere.

During the 1960s Dusseldorf was a prosperous, commercial city and an important centre of artistic activity. He was an influential German artist whose inventive paintings and photographs employed non-traditional materials, such as meteorite dust or detergent. The artists wry probing of aesthetic taste is evinced in his work Alice im Wunderland (Alice in Wonderland) (1972), a painting layered with irony, psychological states, and fiction.

Sigmar Polke – Alice in Wonderland (1972)

Characterized by wit and endless inventiveness, Sigmar Polke created an oeuvre that is wildly diverse in its exploration of mediums and materials. Inspired by his fascination with science and alchemy, Polke innovated techniques in painting and photography by manipulating chemical processes. He deeply impacted the course of painting by removing many of its associations with rational Kantian aesthetics, thereby pointing out the subjectivity and immediacy of the medium. His philosophy of art making, unprecious and democratic in nature, can be summed up as “anything goes,” and Polke’s influence is felt deeply in today’s landscape. He died in June 2010 in Cologne after a long battle with cancer.

SUM-UP. ICONIC ELEMENTS THAT DESCRIBE THE POP ART MOVEMENT

Pop Art movement Pop Art was born in United Kingdom, London in the mid-1950s and in the United States in the late 1950s. It was a creation of several young subversive artists and the first application of the term Pop Art occurred during discussions among artists who called themselves the Independent Group (IG), which was part of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The institute’s founders, Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Herbert Read, Peter Gregory, Geoffrey Grigson and W.L.T Meesens, intended to establish a space where artists, writers and scientists could debate ideas outside the traditional confines of the Royal Academy. It was a center for multi-disciplinary debate, combined with avant-garde art exhibition and performances, within a framework that emphasized a radical social outlook.

Pop Art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, mass culture objects, etc. Material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. The concept of Pop Art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it. It aimed to the use of images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It was also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Pop Art was one of the most extraordinary innovations of the 20th century. It arose from a rebellion against an accepted style and brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence “pop”), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines or comics. In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarder the same significance as the unique. The gulf between “high art” and “low art” was eroding away. The media and advertising were favorite subjects for Pop Art’s artists.

It is widely known that Pop Art coincided with the pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s and it was very much associated with the fashionable, swinging image of London. As an example, Peter Blake designed covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Moreover, he starred actresses like Brigitte Bardot in his pictures, in the same way artist Andy Warhol used the image of Marilyn Monroe in the United States.

In 1952 in London appeared The Independent Group, which was considered the precursor of the Pop Art movement. At the first meeting of the Independent Group in 1952, the co-founding member, artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi introduced a lecture using a series of collages called Bunk!. This series of collages was composed of “found” objects like comic book characters, advertising, magazine covers and all sort of mass produced graphics that mainly represented the American culture. The first work of art which included the word “pop” was Paolozzi’s collage called I was a Rich Man’s Plaything (1947), where the pop appeared in a cloud of smoke emerging from a revolver.

In the United States, pop artists used to reproduce, duplicate, overlay, combine and arrange endless visual details that represented the American culture and society, introducing transformations and acting like commentaries. Pop Art is characterized by techniques and themes drawn from popular mass culture like comic books, advertising and mundane cultural objects. This movement is widely interpreted as a reaction to the ideas of abstract expressionism. Pop Art intended to employ images of popular in contrast to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the mundane elements of any given culture, usually through the use of irony.

The colors used by the Pop Art artists, the predominant colors being yellow, red and blue, were vivid and in comparison to other movements, they did not depict the artist’s inner sensation of the world. They actually referred to popular culture. This was the same culture that inspired artists Andy Warhol to experiment with the technique of silk-screen printing, a very popular technique used for mass production.

The features of Pop Art artworks were: clear lines, sharp paintwork and clear representations of symbols, people and objects found in popular culture. Actually, Pop Art replaced the satirical, destructive and anarchic elements of the Dada movement, which was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century with early centers in Zurich, Switzerland, and after flourished in Paris. It was developed in reaction to World War I, and consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason and aestheticism of the modern capitalist society, and inserted nonsense, irrationality and antibourgeois protest in their works. This art movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. These artists expressed their discontent with violence, war and nationalism and maintained political affinities with the radical left.

Pop artists tended to satirize objects and they sometimes enlarged them to seemingly unnatural proportions. In the pop movement food was a common theme, but also household objects such as chairs and toilets were made out of squishy plastic rather than the materials normally used. As an example, see The Soft Toilet by Claes Oldenburg.

Whether we are talking about bright colors, enlarged objects, clear lines, found objects or silk-screen printing technique, all of them managed to influence the advertising scene of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the advertising scene of today. As Andy Warhol said once, we are now living, our “15 seconds of fame”.

PART 2 | THE ADVERTISIGN SCENE

TIMELINE OF THE ADVERTISING SCENE FROM THE 60S UNTIL TODAY

Advertising is as old as human condition, but branded product placed ads didn’t show until the 18th century when print advertising became the norm. In the 1800 we have the first billboards and ad agencies began to set up their shop. In 1891 companies like Kodak began selling their brand, not just the product. Then in 1908, companies like Ford staged flashy publicity events and pioneered the art of looking cool. The soap opera was born when companies discovered the popularity of radio dramas among women when they did their housework. Bulova watches made the first television commercial that cost $9 in 1941.

The advertising scenes of the 1950s that are set in the period of post-World War II America reveal the optimism and upsurge of the age of consumerism, showing the boom of commercialism and the profound socio-economic effect of paramount position of consumerism in the social community of the United States of America. The advertisements will render the golden age of plentiful products and plentiful buyers whom are enjoying the results of a national pride in the successes of the war, the reunification of family members and new unions of marriage and family life, the joys and the not visually depicted fears of isolation within the newly wealthy society. The coffee and cigarette advertisements depict a fearless victor of war, experiencing the boom of new commodification of everyday lifestyle, in which happiness is perceived in the union of marriage and domestic satisfaction.

In the 1960s psychologist got involved and invented focus groups, which transformed the industry into a calculated science. The tactics got less predictable and the budgets got a lot bigger. Television revenue surpasses magazine and radio sales.

In the 1970s telemarketing started to become a common tactic in order to promote a product as a brand. For the first time, print media feels the monetary pinch of outbound marketing. Time Inc. shuts down Life magazine after 36 years of life. In 1973 Motorola researcher Dr. Martin Cooper makes the first hand-held mobile phone call.

During the 1980s IBM Corp. introduces the IBM personal computer. Three years later, in 1984, Apple launches its mega-successful Macintosh with an epic Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott. The ad cost $900.000 to make and reached 46.4% of American households. In 1987 print advertising is made even easier with the emergence of desktop publishing and the personal computer, leading to an explosion in print advertising.

In the 1990s 2G mobile network advancements precede an explosion in the rise of cell phone usage, paving the way for future advancements like SMS messaging, which arrives in 1992. TV displaces newspapers as the nation’s largest ad medium. In 1994, Phoenix law firm Canter and Seigel advertises their services by posting a message on several thousand newsgroups. This is likely the first automated, large-scale commercial example of spam. It is also the incident that makes the term popular. Between 1995 and 2000s new technologies continue to emerge and become adopted by wide audiences. Mobile phones gain popularity and the Internet becomes a viable tool for commerce, opening the doors for an explosion in marketing. In 1995 the first search engine is launched, followed shortly after by ask.com in 1997. In 1998, search evolve and Google is launched and introduces PageRank, which is the metric Google uses to determine how websites should rank. In 1998, blogging emerges. Brad Fitzpatrick starts Live Journal in March 1999. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan launch blogger.com in August 1999, later purchased by Google in 2003.

In 2000 the bubble pops. Tech-related growth is reflected in a 500% increase in the NASDAQ index, considered an indicator of the performance of technology companies. The new trend leads to consumers engaging with brands in new ways. Instead of simply pushing advertising at consumers online, the benefits of creating value for customers and earning their business begins to take hold. In 2004, social media begins. Facebook is launched. In 2005 Google begins personalized search results that are informed by your past search history. Google branded version of Analytics launches in the same year in November. The demand for it is so high that new signups are suspended after just one week. In 2007 mobile advertising starts to make a point in the advertising scene. 295 million subscribers on 3G networks exist worldwide, popularizing music and video streaming.

In 2010 90% of emails are spam, 90% of U.S. households have a cellphone and internet usage surpasses time spent watching television for younger demographics. In 2012 88% of U.S. internet users ages 14+ will browse or research products online and 83% of them will make at least one purchase via the web during this year.

Due to the massive growth of technology, today we are struggling with the following question: who has the leading role on the scene of spectacle? Who are our show men? Us? The consumers? Or them? The show people?

HOW DID THE POP ART MOVEMENT INFLUENCED THE ADVERTISING SCENE

THE RELTIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND ADVERTISING

The relationship between art as well as advertising has usually been a complex and anxious relationship. Some would dispute that advertising is merely a type of art that is premeditated to sell things. Indeed in United Kingdom, advertising as well as promotion are clustered mutually with the arts and perceived as part of the “creative industries.” For many years, advertising has been a means of the artists to earn some extra cash. This even includes the “anti-consumerists” street artist lapelled as Shepard Fairey has been solicited to do advertising for the likes of Pepsi as well as Saks which is a comfort apartment store. The crusade for the latter paradoxically affirmed “want it.”

But apart from the tranquil association enjoyed by some artists and large brands, there is an explicit aggression between the universe of art and advertising. Thus, advertising has extensively harvested cultural descriptions and repurposed them for its own unprincipled intentions. One certain insensitive current illustration saw Michelangelo’s David utilized by US-based arms company ArmaLite to vend an automatic search, causing indignation in Florence.

In its comparatively brief account, the contemporary street art has been supplied with work that unswervingly attacks brands as well as their advertising images, usually appropriating a big firm’s logo by utilizing its power and reach to turn it back against them. Most of the works entailed directly with the destructive nature of advertising: almost all are decisive for consumerist’s customs that are more general.

The rivalry between art and advertising is not just about a power resist over the meanings that are emblazoned on particular images. It is a fight over public spaces; thus, street art as well as public art needs to contend for attention against the tide adverts. In the modern world, it is seen that there is almost no space that is left unbranded, each of us literally see millions of adverts each day. Projects like Art Everywhere and Brandalism are trying to redress the balance a little but it is still extremely slanted.

Numerous individuals appear to think that advertising is characterized by the deficiency of art. The dispute goes like this: art is something that personal and beautiful that dangles in museums and makes individuals think. Persons think of the starving artist, staying in an unsanitary building and caring concerning the reliability of his passion instead of how much money that they formulate. Advertisements are inescapable banners, posters, radio spots, television commercials, and internet pop ups among others. They are positioned everywhere and someone is gaining off them.

What individuals do not understand is that what good art and good advertisements have in common: it is evident that they are about business and honesty. They do not have to decide one over the other. There is no artist that desires to starve, and no advertisement agency that desires to plaster what-they-understand-being not beautiful. Artists desire to make profits off what they cherish, and advertisers want to formulate profit off they are proud of, too. Andy Warhol positively made headway in highlighting that art and advertisements are linked. He was able to assert the integrity of his task but also freely admitted that he was a part of the consumerist civilization. His work was mass produced: he was not anti-establishment and also he was poor.

FROM ANDY WARHOL’S FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME TO THE BEAUTY OF A SECOND

Andy Warhol's understanding of the impulses that prompted the rise of what we know today as social media or user generated content (UGC) started in his art as a commercial illustrator. The way in which he was generating awareness of a specific product, which in this case were shoes, was by making playful drawings of the object with the help of the “blotted line” technique.

After that, Andy Warhol started setting the base for the Pop Art movement by playing with objects from mass culture and making them pieces of art. The artist is probably the most famous figure in Pop Art, in fact, art critic Arthur Danto once called Warhol "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced”. The movement wanted to erase barriers between fine art, with its tortured practitioners slaving away over a unique painting or sculpture, and mass-produced commercial art, designed to appease all. That was the moment when the Campbell’s soup can appeared in a gallery and not in a supermarket shelf.

Andy Warhol, who didn’t have an education in fine art and had spent the 1950s trying to gain recognition in its elite circles, was in a unique position to comment on the distinction between a gallery wall and a supermarket shelf. The artist was uniquely intuitive and saw the connection between his own desire for acceptance and society’s growing obsession with celebrities. This context fueled the creation of some of his most iconic art works, like the Marilyn Diptych and the Nine Jackies.

Andy Warhol – Marilyn Diptych (1962) and Nine Jackies (1964)

Another element that fueled Andy Warhol’s love for celebrities and fame was his studio. The Factory was the place in which all the arts and artists met. The Factory was the hip hangout for artistic types and the Warhol superstars. “It wasn't called the Factory for nothing. It was where the assembly line for the silk-screens happened. While one person was making a silk-screen, somebody else would be filming a screen test. Every day something new,” said the musician John Cale.

In 1968, Andy Warhol had his first retrospective exhibition at the Moderna Museet Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden. In the catalogue of the performance, the artist wrote: “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes”. Being famous is one of the things his career was all about. Fame and passivity were the two themes that dominate everything he did.

Later, in 1986, Warhol hosted an MTV show called Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes featuring celebrities, artists, musicians, and designers.

Today

If in the past, the roles were clear and simple: the person who is on the stage/wall/TV is the one who is giving us a performance and the person in front of the stage/wall/TV is the one who is receiving the show/performance/painting/sculpture/etc. Today the line between these two opposite parties started to become blurred. As, in the past we didn’t know whether the appropriate place to look for art pieces is a gallery or on supermarket shelves, today we don’t know whether to look at the performer for a little bit of performance, or at us.

The term “spectacle/show/performance” shapes contemporary thinking about people and things by dividing them into two camps: those who want to be in the show and those who just want to look at it. Anyway, society loves the show in all its forms, whether it describes an event or the interpretation of a role, the performance of a car, a perfume or a sound system, whether it refers to history, therapy, or act of mourning. Many of our major preoccupations today are structured by performance. For example, the quality of the spectator, the identity, the memory, the body.

In his book, Philosophy of Performing Arts, David Davies describes and defines the concept of performance. He says the act of the show is nothing more than an action. Obviously, no action can be categorized as a performance, but any performance can be labeled as an action. The difference between a simple action and a performance is given by the fact that the individual in the act of performance acts in a certain way for the attention of those who stand and observe it. So performance is open to research and public observation. Also, an action is categorized as part of a performance even when it is not seen by anyone, but the individual works as if someone's action was observed. We remember that to give a performance, all we need is the thought of being watched by someone.

In Guy Debord’s book, The society of spectacle, the author describes the degradation of human life. Debord describes the level of development that modern society has become, as a society in which real social experiences have been replaced by representations. “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” The performance described by the author is a visible denial of life, a monopoly of appearance. “He is not a supplement of the real world, an ornament added to it. He is the core of realism's unrealism”. Although it captures certain images in the viewers, each such notion is based on the opposite: “the reality appears in the show, while the show is real. This mutual alienation is the essence and support of the existing society.” In fact, it's about melting shapes and contents in a bit of images, in a hyper flow meant to keep us connected.

The theorist explains how social life has evolved from “being” to “having”, this phrase being only the first phase of economic domination: The current phase of total occupation of life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of it seemed. Consumption is increasingly focused on goods that help to display the most opulent status. The show is therefore the heir to all the weaknesses of the Western project.

Douglas Kellner comes and looks at the issue of society and the media from another point of view. While Guy Debord describes the media and the consumerist society as being organized around the product, imagery, convenience and events, Kellner says that the spectacle of media is the type of cultural show that adopts the core values of society, helps the individual to its integration into the community and also moderates conflicts. For Guy Debord, the spectacle represents the description of consumerism, precepts on the essence and the factor of loss of critical spirit within the public due to the passivity of the environment. For Kellner, however, the mass media show is the anchor element in the reality that involves the individual in various activities and does not leave him at the simplest viewpoint.

From the 1960s and 1970s, when Guy Debord wrote about the theory of the society of spectacle, the culture of the show extended to all areas of life. The economy has adapted to the current society and has also become part of a show. In order to be able to sell more and to be relevant to the consumer, the economy must be present in all respects. Adding entertainment and the show of the economy have developed new sectors such as television, film, theme parks, video games or casinos. The entertainment industry in America is currently a priority for consumers at the expense of their clothing or personal care.

Douglas Kellner observes and presents the areas that have grown and evolved into an authentic show. The stars lost their identity and personality, they became images of brands, being put in the position of analyzing each action in order to be in agreement with the message of the product that promotes it. Although sport has always been a form of show due to the pleasure of watching a competition and seeing who wins, the intervention of the new media has developed into a true representation where the consumer meets the brand and where the sports or the players are associated with certain images of companies. Michael Jordan is not just a good basketball player, he's all breathing through Nike pores.

Since 2001, television has begun promoting reality shows such as Big Brother, The Osbournes, and in Romania, Mothers and Cleanses. Individuals have shown that they do not have to have certain skills to reach a public viewer worthy of the screen. In the virtual world of games, we cannot talk about passivity. Here the consumer interaction has reached a new level. The training of the soldiers for the battlefield is done first through video games, and in 2002, to stimulate the enrollment of young people in the army, they were given the opportunity to play a famous game, the price of which was their promise to enlist. The film, sports, television, theater, fashion, art, architecture, music, food, eroticism, video games are examples of environments described by Douglas Kellner who have been imbued with media speculation.

Due to the growth of technology, today everyone can be a graphic designer, photographer, director, etc. The total number of people who use YouTube is 1,300,000,000 people; Instagram has 800 million monthly active users, and 500 million daily active users and worldwide, there are over 2.20 billion monthly active Facebook users.

More pictures are now taken every two minutes than were taken during the entire 1800s. On an average day, 80 million photos are shared on Instagram and when the platform introduced videos, more than 5 million of them were shared in 24 hours. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched every single day.

THE BEAUTY OF A SECOND BY MONTBLANC

In a world where nobody knows where the scene is anymore and where to look; who is the provider and who is the receiver, Montblanc, a brand that produces luxury high-end pens, luxury watches, jewelry & more, decided in 2011 to talk a little bit about the fine line between the artist and the receiver.

Objective

Montblanc created a chronograph as homage to the man who invented it 190 years ago: Nicolas Rieussec. The brand’s challenge was to get people to pay attention to the Rieussec’s chronograph, its anniversary and built awareness for a brand mostly known for its writing instruments.

Idea

The creative solution was to prove, like Rieussec did with his invention, that inside a second there’s a lot more to tell. So the brand challenged people to “seize the moment” and capture beauty in a second long video. The short-film challenge was born.

Execution

The brand teamed up with the film director Wim Wenders and, in a call to action video, asked people to compete online at montblanc-onesecond.com by uploading their one-second video of beauty. They could also compete to make the best compilation of the second-long videos.

The compilation of the best one-second videos submitted from the four rounds of the competition were posted on Vimeo, leveraging the artistic approach of the video community. Selected by Vimeo for the front page, the compilations generated more views and submissions.

Montblanc – The beauty of a second (2011)

Finally, after four rounds of competition, Wim Wenders awarded a Rieussec chronograph to the winners at the Berlin final ceremony.

Success

The campaign was a massive success. The brand had 4436 videos submitted, 4.000.000 video views in the first sixty days, an estimated of 40 million global media impressions and more than 40% increase in brand followers on Facebook. The campaign won around 10 internationally prizes, among which we can enumerate a Gold Branded Content & Entertainment and a Gold Direct Lions at Cannes Lions. The brand was proud to build an invaluable awareness for Montblanc as a watchmaker and also to prove that a classic luxury brand can find its place in the digital era.

The campaign idea was so good that it even generated ideas for other business. In 2013 the 1 second every day app idea is born. Having the same base as a philosophy, Cesar Kuriyama, the author of the app wanted to make sure that he managed to capture one second of beauty from every day from his life in order to be able to appreciate life and be more grateful. Thousands of videos can be found on YouTube with compilation of life seconds made by people that want to appreciate their life more and memorize with the help of the app that makes a short video.

1 second every day app

WORLD GALLERY BY APPLE

Another example of good User Generated Content campaign is the World Gallery campaign by Apple. World Gallery is a celebration of the world’s most popular camera that inspired iPhone owners to take more photos and challenged non-iPhone owners to think about the capabilities of their smart-phone camera.

Background

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were Apple’s most successful product launched to date. The international sales numbers stunned the media, Wall Street and consumers, alike.

It seemed like the new iPhone 6 was without-a-doubt the device to buy, but some skeptical consumers and the press still felt compelled to compare it to other smart-phones on the market. The comparisons they made were for easily quantifiable features: camera pixels, processor power, and battery life. It was a conversation that left out the most impressive feature of the iPhone 6 that you would never find in the review of a tech product: the creative users.

To continue selling the iPhone 6, the brand knew they had to pivot from the comparative conversation that was happening in the media and find a way to prove the power of iPhone.

Category

The brand started by looking for the best opportunity to turn away from the numbers-oriented feature conversation.

In the category, camera is one of the top considerations when it comes to purchasing a new smart-phone. When Apple looked at some of the social conversation around iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the company learned that the camera was the most talked about feature by the media and consumers. And for a good reason: iPhone 6 and iPhone Plus featured a professional-grade camera with crisp still images, true-to-life color accuracy and dramatically improved low-light capabilities. These features were great, but the brand had to disrupt the category convention in which only the rational benefits of a product are told. To keep iPhone top-of-mind for consumers, they had to change the way people viewed and talked about the value of a smart-phone beyond its features.

The research

In order to elevate the conversation beyond specs, Apple had to understand how people interacted with their camera. Apple learned a lot about selfies, golden hour, and cropping. The brand noticed iPhone 6 and iPhone 6’s extreme portability and discreetness encouraged users to flip open the camera at any time to capture a moment with friends, a passing landscape or even stage a slow-motion video.

Insight

More importantly, Apple noticed an interesting behavior… something the users weren’t saying. iPhone owners preferred showing the output of their device instead of talking about the technology of iPhone’s camera. They were proud to share a time-lapse video they captured of a sunset or a still shot of their friend skateboarding, but didn’t ever feel the need to talk about aperture, megapixels or frame rates. And frankly, they didn’t care.

Then, Apple took the research to the web in order to understand digital behaviors and found users also weren’t talking about the camera technology, they were communicating through the photos and videos captured with iPhone. When the brand dove deeper into photo-sharing platforms, it became apparent that consumers were pushing the limits of iPhone’s camera in the world around them. iPhone 6 was the camera of choice for everything from quiet, intimate moments to huge music festivals and a trip to the coffee shop or a trip to Italy. The brand wasn’t talking to people that wanted to buy a phone based on the features sheet – the people that loved iPhone’s camera loved it because they could effortlessly capture the world around them with a beloved and powerful device in their pocket.

Through the web and photo-sharing platforms, Apple discovered an organic community around ‘iPhone-only’ photographers existed on Instagram and Twitter. Users proudly tagged their photos #iPhoneonly or wrote in their profile that all images were captured with an iPhone. This wasn’t just a niche community, either. Over 91 million #iPhoneonly posts existed on Instagram before ‘World Gallery’ was even a creative idea.

Even professional photographers were a part of this photography community, favoring their iPhone over professional DSLRs at times. We saw the impact of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus’ camera in the world with our users and we discovered users have a true passion for iPhone photography. The rest of the category could talk about the specs of their smart-phone cameras, but our opportunity was celebrate the most important component of Apple’s technology: the users.

Objective

The goal of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus campaign was to reframe what users think is possible with the camera in their pocket. Apple wanted iPhone owners to push the limits of the world’s most popular camera and download more camera, photo sharing or editing apps. The brand wanted non-iPhone owners to reconsider the output of whatever device they had in their pocket and be inspired by the photos and videos they encountered around the world.

Most of the amazing photos and videos the brand saw were viewed in small screens on laptops, tablets or smartphones; however, based on the power of iPhone, and the quality and creativity of the iPhone users, Apple knew these deserved to be broken free from the constraints of passive swiping on small screens and shared with the world at large.

Apple wanted to prove that iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus cameras are so powerful that photos and videos taken with the device can be placed around the world to create a larger-than life gallery for people to enjoy.

The idea

To make this a truly global campaign, Apple found iPhone photographers from around the world that captured a variety of subject matters. The photos featured in World Gallery are non-commissioned, user-generated images. Out-of-home elements were selected to enhance their environments and print photos were selected to compliment magazine content. The videos selected for the campaign highlight slow-motion, autofocus and time-lapse features of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Ultimately, 162 photographers were selected for the world’s largest outdoor mobile photography gallery in history. Out of home, print and television ads are featured in 75 cities in 25 countries and on apple.com/worldgallery.

Apple – World Gallery (2015)

Apple – World Gallery (2015)

Success

The campaign had a huge success by being a huge lift for the mobile photography community. In the digital medium, the World gallery campaign had 255 million online impressions from 73 countries, 60 spots photo-editing app VSCO Cam gained on the US App Store, growth of 9797% of the hashtag engagement for #ShotoniPhone on Instagram, as well as the Outdoor Lions prize at Cannes Festival, the 2015 edition.

Conclusion

Whether we are talking about The beauty of a second, 1 second every day or World Gallery or many other examples that are posted out there every second, we can say one thing: Andy Warhol did manage to predict the future. A future in which every person will have its 15 minutes/seconds of fame in this world.

An interesting variant of the phrase has even gained currency in the last period. It was used in an artwork by the graffiti provocateur Banksy, that said: “In the future everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes”.

FROM ROY LICHTENSTEIN’S CRYING GIRLS TO UNDER ARMOUR

Over the past sixty years women have consumed an abundance of often conflicting stereotypical imagery about their role in the world. According to Nancy A. Walker a look into the feminine magazines of 1950s and the 1960s can give us a clear insight of what was the perceived image of a woman in those times.

The image of a woman was connected with domestic themes, all that was related to the family life and how to make it more pleasant: social and family relations, well-being, purchases for the house, activities for the children, schools and neighborhoods, recipes, health, instructions for hairstyle, make-up and for personal appearance. Women were defined through their family skills and their husbands. Women who did not get married were depicted as unattractive, unfortunate spinsters, and those who asserted themselves were dismissed as nagging shrews.

And the same thing happened on other channels as well. Television and pop culture art reflected the image of the woman of that era. The War and Romance room in the Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective at Tate Modern presents paintings in a playful, colorful and frivolous comic book style. All very lighthearted, one could easily think. The men on the wall are in war style action, while the women on the canvases are hopelessly in love. This room is where a man is portrayed as a man – in action, brave, commanding, steering, doing – and a woman as a woman – insofar as having a man is what defines a woman.

In this display the women shown are in the midst of describing their relationship as a fairy tale, professing their love, making up excuses, waiting by the phone, providing reassurance and refusing to ask for help. In all of the scenarios depicted, the man, although absent, defines the scene.

Cartoon strips traditionally thought of as light entertainment, have, in Lichtenstein’s work, been used as a basis to launch serious criticism. Through his mimicking of the cartoon style he holds a mirror up to the art form in order to expose its flaws, as well as society’s.

Roy Lichtenstein – room 4 at Tate Gallery – War and romance

And Roy Lichtenstein was not the only one that played with the image of woman in its artwork. Andy Warhol and the images of his female subjects are among his most striking and form a substantial body of work, but many believe they are also reductive; the emphasis is on the lips, hair and eyeshadow, making sitters including Joan Collins, Grace Jones, Diane von Furstenberg and Jackie Kennedy Onassis appear one-dimensional and superficial.

“The lipstick and hair colour are gendered signs to be sure,” says Dr William Ganis, associate professor of art history at Wells College, New York. “Some scholars have suggested Warhol was making them into drag queens of sorts – a caricature of woman.” The artist made no bones about emphasizing the surface, saying, “I am a deeply superficial person.”

But that’s not the whole story: Warhol was also fascinated by the suffering very famous women went through behind the painted-on smiles. The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, explains, “Some of his images are actually really harrowing.” Marilyn, Liz Taylor and Red Jackie were originally part of a 1962-3 series called “Death and Disaster”, and those criticising the simplicity of these pictures as proof that Warhol objectified women are arguably missing a far deeper significance. Marilyn was painted just two weeks after her suicide in 1962, Elizabeth Taylor was gravely ill when he created Liz Taylor and Red Jackie was made after the death of JFK.

Andy Warhol – Liz Taylor (1964), Marylin (1967), Jackie (1964)

We don’t know the artists’ perception on that time on women. One perception could be that Roy Lichtenstein perceived women as weak, emotional and in need of a help from a man because of the society’s major view which he believed. But maybe he was trying to challenge women to be more than just crying ladies in need of help, because the same Roy Lichtenstein was known as man who adored women.

Another perception comes from his girlfriend, Letty Eisenhauer, who stated in an interview: “Take his series of crying girls. I think Roy was always very angry with Isabel, his ex-wife. I think the crying girls are what he wanted women to be. He wanted to make you cry, and he did – he made me cry. So occasionally, in his paintings, I think that he revealed something of himself.” From an initial social justice/feminist interpretation, the understanding of Lichtenstein’s work moves into his own personal territory, marred by heartbreak.

In the same time, Andy Warhol could be perceived as a man who was objectifying women, but on the other hand he was known as a man who was falling deeply in love with every new person that he met, especially women. Art critic Jonathan Jones believes that the ‘cold’ Warhol was simply a persona he adopted. “He was happy for people to see him as this completely robotic character, with no compassion.” But it’s clear from the women we spoke to this was just a facade. “He’s not just interested [in them] coldly; his art if full of soul and poetry and that goes for the way he depicts women too,” Jones says. He was clearly fascinated with women – both in his art and in his personal life – and none of these relationships were black and white.

The image of women started to change during the 1960s. One of the major events that contributed to the change in women's roles in society was the introduction of Enovid, the first birth control pill, in 1960. With the increasingly widespread use of birth control, women gained greater control over when and if they would have children, allowing many women to enter the workforce who would have otherwise been busy rearing children. Many were challenged by Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, which described the frustration of many women who were unfulfilled by their efforts to conform to society's ideal of femininity, living for their husbands and children, and neglecting their own ambitions and dreams. According to Friedan, "the feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive." In a call to action, she urged women to "break out of the household trap and truly find fulfillment as wives and mothers — by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings."

But even though some discussions were started by the Pop Artist and some changes were made during the 1960s, nowadays society is still struggling to close the gender gap between men and women. That is why the need of new trends in advertising have emerged. Trends, that talk about the need of women empowerment speeches. And in order to portray the society’s pulse regarding women talk, we are going to talk about two main campaigns that made a buzz in social media as well as TV mediums of talk: Will What I Want by Under Armour brand and Like a girl by Always brand.

WILL WHAT I WANT BY UNDER ARMOUR

The chosen case study is the tale of how the brand Under Armour manage to change a sportswear brand dedicated to males into a symbol of female athletic aspiration. The brand wanted to find a solution for a business challenge: how can Under Armour extend its target of consumers without alienating the existing consumers. The campaign’s strategy started from specific insight from their new desired target and their relationship with fitness and then it grew into a big cultural truth about what is means to be a female in the nowadays society. This transformed into a creative idea that connected the brand’s strong performance values to the authentic stories of females today getting to success through their own paths. The campaign brought the brand in the middle of a cultural conversation, managing to truly connect with their new extended target and grow the sales with 28%. And even more, the campaign transformed the brand into an asset that female everywhere could truly feel that they belonged to.

Background

The history of the brand Under Armour goes back in 1996 when the love for football was so big that gave birth to a new entity that had as a mission making all athletes better. The brand’s products were so good from the performance point of view that took the new player next to Nike in the US sportswear market. Under Armour had such a good success because its unexpected popularity amongst the male athletes community. But at the cost of this, Under Armour had forgotten about half the population.

In 2013, the female part of the business target was absent, bringing only 17% of Under Armour’s total revenue of $2.3 billion. In 2014 and 2015, however, new sportswear brands dedicated only to women have emerged on the market proving that it represents a profitable business sector. Brands like Lululemon, Champion and Victoria’s Secret added $975 million in revenues to their businesses.

These revenues came from Athletic Women, a target that spends less than Under Armour’s current female consumer, the Core Athlete, but is four times their size. The new brands started to have success in the market because they were empowering its female consumers, as well as talking about style. With a brand known for performance above all else, Under Armour was poised to be shut out of the women’s category entirely.

Challenge

In 2013, Under Armour’s briefed was to re-position and re-launch their women’s business. In the past year, they had overhauled the women’s collection to compete with the stylish offerings of its new competitors. But product wasn’t going to get them all the way there. There was an even bigger challenge to overcome: Athletic Women – women who are more focused on fitness than extreme performance – outright rejected the brand. They saw Under Armour as “meatheaded" (35%), “aggressive” (46%), “purely performance driven” (64%), and “definitely not for me” (52%).

Looking back on the brand’s history, this wasn’t a big surprise. After all, the brand was born in football, the ultimate alpha-male sport. And to Under Armour’s own admission, previous attempts to appeal to women were to just “pink it and shrink it.”

After decades of ads that pandered to her, this woman more than anyone could see through a brand’s superficial attempts to appeal to her. For a brand whose origins were male, any small misstep in our message could permanently damage her perception of the brand and prevent future chances of her business. This couldn’t be a typical “you go girl” message, brought to her by a sports brand, telling her she can do it “just like the boys.” The brand needed a truth that would prove to do that, unlike any other brand, Under Armour understands her.

Insight and communication strategy

Performance is what underpins Under Armour. But the brand needed to re-articulate this in a way that fits the needs of the Athletic Woman. To do this, the brand needed to understand the role of fitness in women’s’ life.

Mobile diaries from qualitative research revealed that, across the board, the Athletic Woman doesn’t define herself as an “athlete”. She defined “athletes” as people who play sports competitively. To women, fitness was a personal endeavor. Whether she’s improving a mile time or mastering a yoga pose, fitness is about earning something for herself, not about competing against others.

To speak her language, the brand needed to shift performance away from a traditional competitive context and into a personal one. The cultural context for this woman is one of struggle. She feels surrounded by a tremendous amount of pressure. Everywhere she turns, she is preached to with messages disguised as help. One expert may say “lean forward,” but another will say “lean out”. One may say “you can have it all” but the very next will say “focus on one thing”. The problem is, these messages don't empower women. They do the very opposite by generalizing what a woman should aspire to, thereby denying her the power to decide for herself.

In a culture obsessed with debating what a woman should be, the only way for her to free herself from pressure is to define success on her own terms, beyond society’s pressure. This wasn’t just a truth about fitness, but a truth about what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. By reframing performance as an act of inner strength and focus, Under Armour could connect with their new broader target.

The insight of the campaign: The Under Armour Woman has the will to impress only herself. The strategy of the campaign: Present the Under Armour Woman as a woman who doesn’t need permission because she has will.

The creative idea

The idea I Will What I Want celebrates women who defy expectations and achieve their dreams. The idea is that champion women, who are determined to use will to get what they want, are defying a world of contradicting opinions. To launch this idea, the brand told powerful stories of women tuning out pressures to define success on their own terms.

Telling the right stories I Will What I Want became a filter for who to feature in the campaign and what stories to tell. Strategy brought Misty Copeland from the fringes to the center of the campaign. Starting a decade too late with the “wrong body,” Misty faced rejection from top ballet schools. But she blocked out the noise and became the first African-American soloist for the American Ballet Theater. The brand launched with Misty to show how will trumps fate.

Under Armour – I will what I want – Misty Copeland (2016)

Next, the brand featured Gisele Bündchen. The brand identified that Gisele needs will to deal with being the subject of so much public scrutiny and yet still confidently pursue her goals. An interactive website and film brought her story to life, demonstrating that will beats the outside noise.

Under Armour – I will what I want – Gisele Bundchen (2016)

Success

The campaign successfully turned masculine Under Armour into a symbol of female athletic aspiration and put the brand at the heart of a cultural conversation, generating 5 billion media impressions worldwide and more than $35 million in earned media. The brand achieved a complete turnaround, connecting emotionally with Athletic Women and becoming a “brand for me.” The campaign drastically increased brand health scores around being “stylish” (9x increase) and “empowering” (7.3x increase), resulting in a 367% increase in purchase intent and an astonishing 28% increase in sales.

LIKE A GIRL BY ALWAYS

Prior to the campaign period, Always did a research in order to discover specific insights that are related to the adolescence period of young girls in United States of America. The findings of the research was revealing: at puberty, a girl’s confidence drops down. In this delicate period, destructive phrases such as doing something “like a girl” brings a question mark on how strong a girl can be, and can affect her for a lifetime. Always, the P&G feminine care brand, wanted to change this by redefining “like a girl” phrase from an insult to a source of inspiration for young generations.

In 2013, the Feminine Care category prepared the territory for a movement when Always positioned itself as a confidence enhancer due to its superior product performance. Now, a new opportunity was rising in order to develop a fresh and more meaningful understanding of what confidence is in the new generation of consumers’ language. Always needed to redefine what confidence is in order to be appropriate for the brand, but in the same time appealing for a new generation of young girls.

Starting from the insight that more than half of women declared they experienced a drop in their confidence during puberty time, the LikeAGirl campaign was developed to empower young girls during this delicate time when their confidence level is at its lowest and give the brand a strong, relevant and purposeful role in this empowerment. P&G Always needed to develop a campaign that leveraged the brand’s legacy of supporting young girls as they grow into young women, while reinforcing why it’s “relevant to me” and one that “understands the social challenges girls face at puberty today.”

Research

Always started the campaign through a research with the aim of better understanding how confidence during puberty time affects young girls. The research’s results showed that the biggest drop in a girl’s confidence happens around their first period. Having the research as a backup, Always decided that empowering girls during this critical life stage, when their confidence is at its lowest level, should be the mission of the brand. This insight would be the starting point for the campaign’s strategy, message and mission. Like A girl would become an empowering message instead of an insult. The campaign would ask why the phrase Like A girl had become an insult and hold a mirror up to society at large to show how deconstructive these words were to girls, especially during puberty time.

Planning

Always’ communication objectives were to drive an emotional connection to the brand having as a core target the Millennials (individuals born between 1980s – late 1990s), grow its popularity and brand loyalty. The campaign’s strategy was to use the like a girl common phrase and catch its subtle yet negative meaning in order to create a global scale movement.

The campaign’s strategy was brought to life with the help of a technique called social experiment. The technique was especially chosen in order to show the impact a common phrase such as like a girl has on society, particularly on girls around puberty time. The core target of the campaign was formed by girls around puberty age, but in the extended target all generations of women (and even men) could be included.

The starting point of the campaign was a video that was a simulation of a casting scene in which people of all ages captured the like a girl phrase in their own body words. The brand associated with award-winning documentarian and director, Lauren Greenfield, in order to help bring to life the best in each person, which was participating at the experiment, of what like a girl phrase could look like. During filming it wasn’t a shock when the brand’s insight came to life: between puberty and adulthood women had internalized the like a girl phrase as being the symbol of weakness and vanity. The social experiment also portrayed how little encouragement and positive feedback can benefit in changing girls’ attitudes of what it means to proudly do think like a girl.

After the video was developed, the rest of the campaign came naturally to complete the whole message and empower women by showing that like a girl should be a meaningful positive statement and not an insult. Always had in mind as an objective to drive two million video views and 250 million media impressions.

Always – Like a girl campaign (2014)

Success

The Like a girl campaign exceeded the brand’s initial objectives and what started as a social experiment became a trending social conversation that covered all the media spaces around the world. The Like a girl video became one of the most popular breakthrough viral videos of the year and managed to build a monumental shift in the conversation around the globe. Always managed to succeed its objectives which was to emotionally connect with its younger consumers. The brand research showed that Always was supported by 81% of the 16-24 years old female respondents in creating a movement to reclaim like a girl as a positive and inspiring statement.

Conclusion

Whether we are talking about campaigns like “I will what I want” from UnderArmour or “Like a girl” from Always, the advertising scene of today has made a big shift in its beliefs. The perception of woman of today is of a highly smart human being, independent, strong, beautiful and with faults, like all human beings. Whether the Pop Artists of the 60s wanted to challenge the society in order to arriver where we are here today or they were just portraying the society’s view of women in order to acknowledge something, I believe that the female community of today is deeply grateful of the media portrayal’s of the female image of today.

FROM DAVID HOCKNEY’S TWO BOYS CLINGING TOGETHER TO LOVE HAS NO LABELS

The subject of “being different” has been a discussion of decades. For most people the Sixties was a time of sexual awakening and experimentation. But it wasn't until later that gay and bisexual men could share that freedom. And the art scene reflected all of that, David Hockney being one of the precursors of the Pop Art movement and in the same time of the freedom discussion.

In We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961), red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem. In California, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. It is out of this need to portray gay life that Hockney started formulating his hedonistic, sun-bathed image of California. He painted men sleeping near/entering/leaving swimming pools, naked men showering, and friends going about their lives. Most notoriously, in 1972, he painted Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which captured Peter Schlesinger, his partner at the time, swimming to the surface of a pool and Hockney looking down at him.

Until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, homosexual acts were illegal even in private. These new images were a political act, as well as a fantasy he willed into being. Take Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, in which a lanky pink boy in pinny and socks soaps the back of a naked hunk standing beneath a blue jet of water. David Hockney was imagining California permissiveness before he had even been there, conjuring a utopia that would become both his home and best-known subject.

David Hockney – Domestic scene, Los Angeles (1963)

Andy Warhol, just like David Hockney, opened the road to what we know today as an open minded person. Andy Warhol identified as gay and his work drew heavily on his participation in the LGBT community. From his 1950s Boy Book drawings that lovingly depicted the sensuous male form to his poignant self-portraits in drag in the 1980s, Warhol openly expressed his queer identity in life and art, even when homosexuality was criminalized and suppressed in the United States of America.

Andy Warhol – Torso (double) (1982)

Even though some discussions were started by the Pop Artist and some changes were made during the 1960s, nowadays society is still struggling with judgmental feelings over something or someone that is just different. That is why the need of new trends in advertising as well have emerged. Trends that encourage people to close decades of bad judgment over different races, people or kinds of love. In order to mirror the society’s image of what it means to be different, I am going to present one main campaign that had a significant awareness on all the media channels: Love has no labels by Ad Council.

LOVE HAS NO LABELS BY AD COUNCIL

The campaign addresses polarizing and politically charged issues – bias, discrimination, and prejudice – by celebrating the one thing everyone can relate to love.

Bias, prejudice, and discrimination are perhaps the most polarizing problems facing the world today. Most adults will resist messages that suggest they are biased, but will be far less implicitly biased if they are exposed to individuals different from them. The brand needed an approachable creative solution that helped people recognize the biases they didn’t even know they had.

This strategy translated into a deeply emotional creative idea: An x-ray screen hid the identities of real people as they embraced, danced, and kissed. Viewers mentally filled in the blanks of what constituted friendship, romantic love, and family. When the couples were revealed, so too were individual biases, as each relationship spanned different religions, races, disabilities, and more, demonstrating that “love has no labels.”

The idea was further brought to life by an unprecedented collaboration of iconic brands, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, P&G, Unilever, Allstate and State Farm. These leading brands united in solidarity and temporarily “unlabeled” themselves in the name of diversity and inclusion.

In only a few months, the campaign video achieved over 110 million views and started to shift attitudes and behaviors surrounding diversity and inclusion.

Issue

Our society is fraught with tension. Labels unnecessarily divide us. Discrimination based on labels such as race, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion and sexual orientation is hurting millions of Americans daily. For example…

• 1 in 5 LGBT Americans feels that there is little or no acceptance of their community.

• 6 in 10 Latinos say that anti-Latino discrimination is a major problem.

• 6 in 10 African Americans say that they are not satisfied with the way they are treated in society.

• Up to 85 percent of students with disabilities experience bullying.

Insight

Through in-depth literature reviews and primary interviews with a wide range of Americans across age, gender, race and ethnicities, there was one insight that rose to the top: Most Americans consider themselves to be unprejudiced. We all want to be perceived as kind and fair; however, we unconsciously hold negative associations against those who we see as different than ourselves. This implicit bias fuels negative stereotypes within and across communities (e.g. at work, in schools, in our justice system, etc.) which are often manifested in small and large ways.

Challenge

Encourage Americans to reconsider the biases they do not know they have.

Communication Strategy: Promote acceptance and celebrate differences; Inspire people to show their acceptance of diversity; Raise awareness of implicit biases that exist inside people’s cultures; Empower people to stand up against bias.

Brand Strategy: Engage iconic corporate partners to adopt the campaign and spread the message; Solicit a wide range of media platforms to support the message; Work with leading non-profit partners to inform the communication strategy and content.

The Idea

To end bias, people need to first become aware of it. And then we need to do everything within our power to stop it.

Creative Activation

The brand filmed a live installation on Valentine’s Day that featured x-ray skeletons dancing, hugging, and kissing, allowing the crowd to mentally fill in the blanks and guess who was behind the screen. The real couples and relationships were later revealed: a mixed race heterosexual couple, Muslim and Jewish friends, a homosexual couple and their adopted son, and more. This stunt exposed viewers’ implicit biases and reminded us that no matter how we are labeled on the outside, we’re all human on the inside. The recorded stunt was used for TV PSAs and an online video that drove viewers to test their own biases on the campaign website and share their stories of love and diversity.

Campaign materials drove to LoveHasNoLabels.com, where users could learn about bias, take a bias quiz, get tips on how to challenge bias, use the Faces of Love tool to join the campaign, and more.

Ad Council – Love has no labels (2015)

Success

The campaign was a success. The brand had online video exposure of over 110 million views, 825,000 likes, 1.6 million shares. It was the second most viewed community & activism campaign of all time, most viewed branded video campaign of 2015, 20th most viewed branded video campaign of all time, best performing video on Upworthy ever. And most important of all there has been an increase in the number of adults who report they are regularly accepting of others and/or encourage others to be more inclusive.

Conclusion

Whether we are talking about social experiments transformed in advertising campaigns like Love has no labels by Ad Council or portraying new patterns of families, like the ad from Campbell’s soup, the advertising scene shows us that the world of today is changed. What started in the 1960s as a representation of the unusual, taboo, prohibited, nowadays is part of the social norm that enter every family’s living room through their TV media channels or through their phones through social media channels.

Campbell’s soup ad (2015)

CONCLUSION

Douglas Kellner comes and looks at the issue of society and the media as the type of cultural show that adopts the core values of society, helps the individual to its integration into the community and also moderates conflicts. For Douglas Kellner, the mass media show is the anchor element in the reality that involves the individual in various activities and does not leave him at the simplest viewpoint.

And the same is happening with art, but on a smaller scale. The definition of art has normally fallen into multiple categories: expression, form, and representation. Plato primarily created the notion of art as “mimesis” which, in Greek, means replication or simulation. Art can be perceived as a mirror of what is happening in the society. A mirror of a small group, a community of minorities, a trend that predicts the future course of the majority of the society, as is happening today with the Pop Art philosophy of the 1960s.

Pop Art movement was born in United Kingdom, London in the mid-1950s and in the United States in the late 1950s. The Pop Art movement from United Kingdom talked about the changes that were happening in United States of America and not yet present in The United Kingdom, while the movement from America symbolizes the artistic expression of the prosperity era which followed the austerity period after the Second World War.

Pop Art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, mass culture objects, etc. Material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material. It aimed to the use of images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use or irony. It was also associated with the artists’ use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. The colors used by the Pop Art artists, the predominant colors being yellow, red and blue, were vivid.

The features of Pop Art artworks were: clear lines, sharp paintwork and clear representations of symbols, people and objects found in popular culture. This art movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture.

The concept of Pop Art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it. Pop Artists talked about the common elements from the mass culture. All of them. Even the taboo subjects, like being gay in a society where such a status was illegal, an equal society in which women have other roles than housewives or being famous even though according to the majority of a society you don’t have any special talent to offer.

The world that Andy Warhol predicted 60 years ago is happening today. A world in which every human being, with talent or not, has its chance of “15 minutes of fame”. And we can see that effect in the way technology has developed and gave a chance to fame to everyone. More pictures are now taken every two minutes than were taken during the entire 1800s and new job roles have emerged, such as: brand ambassadors or social media manager. The industry of advertising is showing all that effects with the help of building campaigns that fits the society of today. The beauty of a second by Montblanc or World gallery campaign by Apple are such examples.

Another element that Pop Artist like Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol have cracked while being in the 1960s is the subject of women role in society. The artist tried to challenge the role of women by portraying them as crying girls, helpless or just beautiful, succeeding in raising questions about what is a woman’s role in the 1960s society and the one of today. Campaigns from the advertising scene that are trying to challenge the women status of today can be enumerated: I will what I want from Under Armour or Like a girl campaign from Always. The advertising campaigns of today had its inspiration in the art of the 1960s? Definitely.

And the most taboo subject of them all is represented by David Hockney and Andy Warhol’s proposal. In a society when being something else than heterosexual was illegal, the Pop Artist attacked the subject of being gay. David Hockney was portraying men who were in love with each other, while Andy Warhol talked about the male body in a different way that the society was used to. Today, the advertising industry is collecting insights from the society and is having campaigns like Love has no labels by Ad Council TV spots in which we see a family formed by two men and a child by Campbell’s soup brand. The advertising scene of today is a representation of our society. A society, that in the 1960s was a minority and it was a taboo to talk about, today it is part of the social norm.

Pop Art was one of the most extraordinary innovations of the 20th century. It arose from a rebellion against an accepted style and brought art back to the material realities of everyday life, to popular culture (hence “pop”), in which ordinary people derived most of their visual pleasure from television, magazines or comics. In Pop Art, the epic was replaced with the everyday and the mass-produced awarder the same significance as the unique. The gulf between “high art” and “low art” was eroding away. Just like is happening today between art and advertising.

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