This blog post examines various expressive methods and strategies artists use to effectively deliver critical messages about mass media, analyzing their artistic significance.
Many artists distrust mass media, suspecting it of manipulation or propaganda, and regard popular culture as shallow. They have expressed their views in various ways. For example, one artist explicitly revealed a negative attitude toward mass media in a sculpture titled ‘A Powerful Blow for Freedom,’ depicting a figure smashing a television with a forceful gesture. While such works are visually powerful, there is also a risk that their intent may not be fully conveyed.
Thus, artists’ aversion to mass media has limitations when expressed solely through their works. Audiences often fail to clearly grasp what these pieces are criticizing or struggle to comprehend the depth of their message. This is because the artwork alone cannot explain why the artist is so indignant. For instance, smashing a few television sets will not change mass media, making this powerful sculpture appear rather impotent. Therefore, artists need to consider alternative approaches to convey their message more clearly.
Negative attitudes toward mass media can also be found in so-called fundamentalist painting. Artists of this tendency agonized over finding the unique characteristics of painting itself—its very essence. Pursuing their goal to extremes, they ultimately eliminated the image of the subject from painting. They believed this was the path to rejecting mass media like photography, film, and television, which are saturated with images. In painting, where the images of objects and the various appearances of the world vanished, one could no longer find subjects or content in the traditional sense. Instead, the process and method of painting became important, and this itself became the subject of painting. This can be seen as painting’s desperate attempt to defend itself against the overwhelming influence of mass media. As a result, painting found its own identity distinct from mass media, but what remained was only an empty canvas revealing painting’s impoverishment.
Meanwhile, some artists attempted criticism not through direct confrontation with mass media, but by appropriating elements of that media. This was another strategy to maintain distance from mass media while sharpening the edge of criticism. Artists sought ways to express critical intent not merely by rejecting mass media outright, but from within it.
Was there no case where painting successfully criticized mass media without abandoning its content? Pop Art is intriguing in that it actively utilizes products of popular culture while simultaneously critiquing mass media within that very context. This is particularly evident in early British Pop Art. They appropriated images from popular culture and focused on the new meanings created by repositioning them within images of different contexts. Through this, they expressed critical intent, and their critique of popular culture was conducted in the same manner. Later American Pop Art sometimes displayed an ambiguous attitude or optimism toward popular culture, neither rejecting nor affirming it. Yet even within this, there are works that can be interpreted as critical responses. An example is Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Whaam!’, created by imitating the style of comics, a form of popular culture.
Roy Lichtenstein became interested in comics because of formal elements like color and depiction methods. He focused on how comics represent the world. For instance, when comics depict war, the horror and suffering of war are obscured by the bright, cheerful style of comics. In ‘Whaam’, Roy Lichtenstein enlarged a common aerial combat scene from comics to over four meters, exaggerating it, and used color even more decoratively, making the representational method of comics itself the subject. In this sense, ‘Whaam’ is a painting that demands attention to form, much like abstraction. Yet content also plays a crucial role in appreciating the work. Only when viewers recognize the unsettling contradiction between ‘Whaam’s violent subject matter and its cheerful depiction does the artist’s critical intent truly succeed.
