"in due course themselves advertisements?" Painterly Abstract Painting and Discourses of Consumer Culture in the 1950s

Abstract

This essay reconstitutes the sense artists and intellectuals made of vanguard painting in relation to a consumer culture they observed burgeoning in the United States during the 1950s. In analyzing how painterly abstract painting approximated its forms and practices, they surmised consumer culture was becoming hegemonic and tending to frustrate redress thereof. However, the essay identifies an alternative to the inevitable course of culture commentators espied and disparaged. In his early sculpture Claes Oldenburg wittily engaged to revalorize the very painterliness affording commodification in the first place.