When Art Met Mass Culture

In 1962, Andy Warhol exhibited thirty-two paintings of Campbell's soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Each canvas depicted a different flavor. The art world was horrified and fascinated in equal measure — was this a celebration of consumer culture or a devastating critique of it? Warhol refused to say.

Pop Art declared that the boundary between high art and commercial imagery was artificial and obsolete. If a soup can could hang in a gallery, then the gallery's claim to special cultural authority was exposed as a convention, not a truth.