"Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.” - Clement Greenberg

Betty Friedan is credited with igniting the Second Wave of Feminism in 1963 with her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique. In it, she articulated the loss of identity experienced by many women who were traditionally only valued in their roles as nurtures of home and children. Friedan called for women to throw out their pots and pans in favor of fulfilling careers in the public realm in order to create their own identities and sense of worth - and many women met the challenge.

In spite of their popular imagery, Pop art betrays an interest in formal aesthetics

• Large scale makes representational images abstract-like

• Allover compositions

• Strategic use of technique and materials

James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 2003. Collage.

F111 Source material

James Rosenquist designed the eighty-six-foot-long F-111 to wrap around the four walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery, at 4 East Seventy-Seventh Street in Manhattan. He began the painting in 1964, in the middle of a turbulent decade marked by the escalating Vietnam War. Funded by citizens' tax dollars, the F-111 fighter-bomber plane was being developed as the USA's newest, most technologically advanced weapon. Rather than celebrate its military might, Rosenquist used the plane as a symbol of the economic implications of war. As it flies "through the flak of consumer society," he later explained, the jet's sharply pointed fuselage pierces superimposed images of commercial products and references to war, such as the bullet-shaped hair dryer floating above a young girl's head and the atomic mushroom cloud frozen behind a beach umbrella. Through its expansive network of colliding visual motifs, unfolding across twenty-three panels, F-111 questions what the artist has described as "the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising." Its jumps of scale, surprising juxtapositions of fragments of imagery, and vivid palette exemplify Rosenquist's singular contribution to Pop art in the United States. - Art Daily January 25, 2011

Claes Oldenburg in The Store

Claes Oldenburg with soft Ice Cream sculpture

Claes Oldenburg, Pie a la Mode, 1962.

Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake, 1962.
4' 10" X 9' 6" X 4' 10".

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Dormeyer Mixer, 1965.

Marisol, Ruth, 1962.

Marisol, Dinner Date, 1963.

Martha Rosler, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: A Woman with Vacuum (Vacuuming Pop Art), 1966 - 1972.

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen Sink, 1975.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Big Shot, 1961.

Niki de Saint Phalle creating a shooting picture

Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Utvedt, Hon, 1966.