Many artists have tried different approaches to express their distrust and criticism of mass media. Direct rejection or criticism alone has its limitations, and genres like pop art have attempted to use mass media to more effectively communicate critical messages.
Many artists distrust mass media as suspect of manipulation and propaganda, and consider popular culture to be shallow. They have expressed their ideas in a variety of ways. For example, one artist blatantly expressed his negative attitude toward mass media by depicting a figure smashing a television set with a powerful gesture in a sculpture called “A Punch for Freedom.” While these works are visually powerful, there is a risk that their intentions are not fully conveyed.
The artists’ antipathy toward mass media can only be expressed so much through their artwork. Viewers often don’t have a clear idea of what these works are criticizing, or the depth of their message. This is because the artwork alone doesn’t tell us why the artist is so resentful. For example, if a few television sets are smashed, nothing will change in the mass media, making this powerful piece seem rather impotent. Therefore, artists need to consider other approaches to get their message across more clearly.
A negative attitude towards mass media can also be found in so-called fundamentalist painting. Artists of this tendency sought to find what is unique to the art of painting, the roots of painting. They pursued their goal to the extreme and ended up removing the image of the object from their paintings because they thought that was the way to negate mass media such as photography, cinema, and television, which are full of images. With the images of objects and other aspects of the world gone, there was no subject matter or content in the traditional sense. Instead, the process and method of painting became important and became the subject of the painting itself. This can be seen as a desperate attempt by painting to defend itself against the overwhelming influence of mass media. As a result, painting found itself distinguished from mass media, but all that was left was a blank canvas that showed the poverty of painting.
On the other hand, some artists have attempted to criticize mass media by borrowing parts of it rather than confronting it outright. This was another strategy to distance themselves from the mass media and set up a day of criticism. Rather than simply denying the mass media, artists sought ways to express their critical intentions within it.
Has there ever been a successful critique of mass media without giving up the content of the painting? Pop art is interesting in that it actively utilizes the products of popular culture and critiques the mass media within them. This is especially evident in early British Pop Art, where artists borrowed images from popular culture and rearranged them in a decontextualized image to create new meanings. In doing so, they expressed critical intentions, which in turn criticized popular culture in the same way. Later American pop art often shows an ambiguous attitude or optimism that is neither negative nor positive toward popular culture, but there are works that can be interpreted as a critical response. “For example, works such as “Whaam” by Roy Lichtenstein, which imitates the style of comics, a form of popular culture.
“Lichtenstein became interested in comics because of their formal elements, such as colors and methods of depiction. He was interested in how comics represented the world. For example, when comics deal with war, the horrors and suffering of war are masked by the bright, cheerful style of comics. “In Whaam, Roy Lichtenstein exaggerates a common aerial battle scene in comics by enlarging it to over four meters in size and using more decorative colors, making the way comics represent the world itself a subject. In this respect, “Whaam” is a painting that demands attention to form, like an abstraction, but the content is also an important factor in the appreciation of the work. The artist’s critical intention is fulfilled when the viewer recognizes the contradiction between the violent content of Whaam and the cheerful way of depicting it as eerie.
