America and Modernity

After World War 2 came about a new art 'movement' called Abstract Impressionism, started in America it was the first time that Amercian art had an influence on artists world wide.

This style of art had an important predeccesor, surrealism. Surrealism art gave inspiration by ways of its seeming way of spontainous and imaginiate creation, this new art was in direct action to soret of rebel against German expressionists, who had created anti-figurative, abstract ways of learning art through schools such as the Bauhaus and Futurism. Abstract impressionism art was seen as rebelious and against anarchy.

Jackson Pollock a leading artist in this new movement created vibrant, action style paintings, which when looked at felt 'busy' to the eye. These paintings where not seen expressionist pieces of art, and compared to some other artists around at the time doing even more oppisite designs to Pollock, even they wern't classed as creating exprisionist art or even an abstract style art. Yet all of them claimed they where Abstract impressionists.

This style of art became more established and then went on to being taught in art schools around America gaining world wide recognition, bringing about a new era in American art work which was indeed abstract impressionism.

Pop Art was another movement that came about in the mid 1950's, it originated in Britain and went onto become popular in America in the 1960's. This movement challenged the idea of fine art and started to include art into more main stream public advertisements and graphic design on TV and film. Pop art was formed mainly from the culture around at the time, and was used cleverly by the americans in sophisticated advertisements to sell of products more easier. Art now had gone extremely commercial and was being used on almost everything, Andy Warhol a leading designer in this movement created a packaging design for a tomato soup product in 1964, which was meant to get the product to sell more, everything was just being made to look more modern and appealing to surrounding community.

Op Art came from the constructive teachings of the Bauhaus, it's simply a shortened name for optical art. As science and technology was moving along during this time, artists started to understand the way human vision works, and by using different colours and shapes, they could create optical illusions on the mind, hence Op Art which came around the 1960's.

Conceptual Art came in the 1970's, this style of art based it work on having more predominant concepts and ideas, rather than letting the aesthetics overtake the meaning of the art. In basics the decisions and concepts where created before hand to be able to produce a piece of art to acquire a desired effect, or to meet a certain purpose.

A French artist called Marcel Duchamp took the idea of conceptual art and made probably the most ground breaking revolution in art history, he challenged the idea of what could actually be 'art'. Duchamp came up with the idea to get a general urinal and then literally just turning it upside down, he submitted it as a 'fountain' at a world wide exhibition. This challenged all ideas of art and what art actually is, the urinal wasn't unique in anyways, it wasn't sculptures of hand made, it was just a urinal turned on its side to make it have a new functionality of a fountain. Once critics had realised what Duchamp had done, by creating a concept and producing the idea and challenging art, it meant people could now make anything into art, with a good idea/concept behind it.

Art as a Commodity
Art has become so popular that we currently think of it as a commodity, almost everyone has some form of art, whether it be a painting on the wall or personal taken photographs, art can be almost anything creative in culture nowadays, buildings and statues and pretty much any structures are designed to aesthetically pleasing, they look like pieces of art themselves. The influence art has had on the world has been immense and in our current culture we basically see art as a norm, whereas before art was seen as a unique skill among certain people, now art is being taught everywhere, and everyone has the chance to become a form of artist in there own rights.

Finally art is generally made for profit nowadays, or to make some kind of income generally. The world we live in is money driven and as technology and cultures improves new art comes, while the most important revolutionising old art has been put into museums so we can all remember how it all started.