‘Car, motorcycles, diners and fast-food emporiums were not supposed to be the stuff or art’. with reference to two artists, how has american painting over turned this taboo?

‘Car, motorcycles, diners and fast-food emporiums were not supposed to be the stuff or art’. With reference to two artists, how has American painting over turned this taboo?

In this essay I will explain the process that over turned the taboo of what should be an art subject or not. I will show that, if in the nineteen seventies cars, motorcycles, diners and fast food emporiums turned into inspiration for the Photorealists, it is because the Pop Artists had already started to question the boundaries of high and popular art. However, first of all, it is essential to understand how all these changes are connected with the postmodern movement as whole.
The roots the new concepts of what would be ‘art stuff’ or not go back to the break between the modern and postmodern periods. It is related with the failure of the modernistic program, formed mostly by the Enlightenment ideas of progress, independent subject and truth. According to Jean Francois Lyotard, the entire social project that had dominated western society since the eighteenth century had become ‘exhausted’ by the nineteen sixties. Fredric Jameson argues that a new society had emerged characterised by the fast consumption, the mass media growing power and the standardisation of almost everything. A new ruling capitalism, baptised by him as ‘multinational capitalism’, in which “aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production generally”; and “culture has become a product in its own right.’ In his view, capitalism had become all that stand around us, ‘a kind of nature- the air we all breathe’. Such deep changes in thought could also been noticed in the arts field. The decadence of the modern principals turned artists against the Abstract Expressionism that had dominated the scenery for almost two decades. The Greenbergian ideology of art as an autonomous sphere turned out-dated. Lyotard called artists and writers to come back ‘into the bosom of the community, or, at least, if the