From its early dismissal by established critics to its rapid embrace by the public-at-large, Pop art represented a dramatic turning point in the development of postwar art. For that reason, it has whetted scholarly interest and has been the focus of numerous art-historical studies over the years. In her eminently readable and engaging book Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Sara Doris dives into the debates that greeted Pop upon its emergence in the late 1950s and that have continued to the present day. Doris aims to provide a deeper and more nuanced reading of Pop art by “situating it within the social and cultural debates within which it participated” (16). Although other publications on Pop also contextualize the movement aesthetically, socially, culturally, and, to some extent, politically, Doris’s well-defined focus on specific aspects of culture—such as an expanding middle class and its influence on taste, an economy of planned obsolescence, the development of camp, and the new teen sensibility—results in a revealing study. In large part because of social upheaval during the postwar years, especially the sixties and early seventies, culture, according to Doris, served as a “site for the expression of anxieties about the instability of social hierarchy and normative cultural values” (16). Throughout this book, Doris deconstructs and analyzes this unstable and shifting postwar cultural landscape.

In five tightly constructed chapters, Doris demonstrates how Pop systematically both participated in and was symptomatic of the national cultural crisis. Before she turns to Pop’s resonance and significance, Doris lays the contextual foundation. In chapters 1 and 2, she reconstructs the cultural debates and anxieties central for her argument that Pop subverted established norms by championing the taste of “outsiders” (e.g., teenagers and campy gay subculture). She also carefully parses the relationship between the positions of cultural commentators like Clement Greenberg, Dwight MacDonald, and Susan Sontag. Particularly valuable is the way Doris addresses the fluctuations in each critic’s position as dictated by changing personal politics and historical circumstances.

The contest over culture is expanded upon in chapter 2, in which Doris deftly demonstrates how the issues debated by Greenberg, MacDonald, and Sontag (such as the nature of the avant-garde, kitsch, midcult, masscult, and camp) were played out in a public realm characterized by increased affluence and mobility. With the expansion of the middle class and the greater porosity of class boundaries, taste became a critical signifier in establishing position within the social hierarchy. In the ever-growing suburbs, away from the established hierarchy and taste “leaders” in the cities, anxiety and uncertainty over taste signifiers became particularly acute. Grounding the chapter in an examination of Russell Lynes’s differentiation between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow taste, Doris chronicles with effective examples the ways in which the popular press, corporate marketing campaigns, and advertising all played into the anxiety over defining social position through taste. This taste was expressed through consumption, the more conspicuous the better. The result was a complex dance of sorts in which the steps (i.e., purchases) that each class took depended on those of other classes—a constant repositioning of each class vis-à-vis each other. Those of elite status struggled to redefine the signs that indicated class difference and social standing. But increasingly, the leading in this dance was accomplished not by the usual cultural arbiters (e.g., critics, intellectual elite, moneyed class) but by an expanding, increasingly affluent middle class eager to acquire the taste that would announce their elevation into the upper echelon of society. Because of the ease with which middlebrow (and even lowbrow) culture absorbed or assimilated highbrow culture, this dance could best be described, for the upper class, as a rearguard action to hold the encroachments of popular culture at bay.

Pop art comes back into the picture in chapter 3. Its commodity status was highlighted by commercial success. Doris chronicles Pop’s embrace by both dealers and nouveau riche collectors, despite critics’ dismissal of this art form. She further explores how this reception announced a shift in cultural authority. As a result of its commercial success, by 1965 Pop was acknowledged as high art by the art world at large. At the same time, it was recirculated back into mass culture through home furnishings, fashion, and advertising. Pop thus had a presence in the realms of both high art and popular culture. Doris reveals the dynamic at work: “If art was apparently being trivialized by its association with mass culture, that culture was simultaneously invested with increased status” (150).

This shifting cultural construct resulted in new forms of taste. In her 1966 essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” Sontag identifies an emergent cultural attitude that renders irrelevant the distinction between high and low. Using this idea as her springboard in chapter 4, Doris examines the relationship between Pop art and youth culture. She argues that both shared an impatience with tradition, an interest in being cool and witty, and a disdain for old cultural priorities and boundaries. She demonstrates the connections between Pop and rock ‘n’ roll, mod style, fashion fads, and the androgyny that increasingly characterized youthful appearances.

In her final chapter, Doris arrives at what is, perhaps, her central thesis—that Pop artists were preoccupied with obsolescence. She claims that this lies at the heart of Pop’s subversion of consumer culture. She explains:

By presenting us with the commodity that is no longer desirable—one that has become faintly ridiculous, even—pop art challenges the claims of consumer culture to satisfy our desire through the ‘new-and-improved’ version. It does so by de-glamorizing the commodity, or commodified celebrity, by cloaking it in a style that is conspicuously dated and thereby rendering its desirability obsolescent. This de-glamorization allows us . . . to see past the glamour and recognize the way in which we are manipulated by these images. (10)

What were the obsolescent subjects of Pop? Doris utilizes examples from the work of James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and Andy Warhol to reveal their selection of passé imagery, thereby drawing attention to the strategies of planned obsolescence so central to marketers and manufacturers following World War II. For instance, she analyzes Warhol’s famous series of Marilyn portraits and highlights his selection of a dated photograph of the movie star and his TV-cool presentation (both stylistically and emotionally) of the recently deceased celebrity. In so doing, Warhol demonstrated his sensitivity to the speed with which fads and trends superseded each other and celebrities faded to has-been status. Discussing Warhol’s celebrity portraits leads Doris to a consideration of camp (especially as embodied in the “soft masculinity” of his portraits of Troy Donahue, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley) as a “terrain suspended between present-day stylishness and nostalgic evocativeness” (205). According to Doris, Lichtenstein’s involvement with obsolescence focused on his images that interpreted works of modernist masters. In these works, states the author, Lichtenstein “engaged in the form of obsolescence most germane to the cultural debate of the era: that of modernism itself” (215).

Doris’s examples and argumentation are persuasive; in addition, reviewing the historical evidence from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it seems preposterous to challenge the notion of planned obsolescence as a reigning mindset and marketing strategy in the 1960s. Still, Pop artists also produced works that seem to focus emphatically on the current and new rather than solely on the passé. For example, in his large-scale magnum opus of 1965, F-111, James Rosenquist uses as his subject a fighter-bomber that had just been approved for production in April of 1965—far from obsolete.

Finally, Doris demonstrates that Pop’s rapid ascent in the art world itself serves as a case study in the quick turnover characteristic of planned obsolescence. One aspect that seems worth exploring is the parallel between planned obsolescence and the avant-garde obsession with innovation. Although this relationship is mentioned in passing, delving into this parallel might have complicated (in a positive way) an understanding of the relationship between the values of highbrow culture and those of mass culture. Further, it might have provided a nice symmetry to the end of the book, given that it opens with Greenberg’s emphatic binary of avant-garde and kitsch.

Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on Pop, and will be useful not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the changing social dynamics of the 1960s and the cultural debates that ensued.