Nearly seventy years ago, Whitechapel Gallery staged This is Tomorrow, a seminal exhibition featuring practitioners of Lawrence Alloway’s "fine art/popular culture continuum," better known as the Independent Group. Grappling with post-war industrialism, this continuum reflected a new standardization of culture, one that was disseminated through mass media and realized through commerce.

When soldiers returned home and the baby boom commenced, a culture of consumption was ignited. Driven by post-war optimism, traditionally upper-class products and appliances were marketed as essential commodities. The right home, car, and dishwasher could make identity and personal satisfaction easy to secure. Such commodification of the consumer, as noted by William Leach, established a new measure of individual value:

“The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society.”¹

Shifting towards accessibility and direct engagement, culture transitioned from the life of the mind as practiced in the salons of the elite and privileged to a mass-produced array of films, print media (specifically comics), radio, and music. These mediums, bolstered by the rise of in-home radios and televisions, became industries— creating a clear contrast to the consumer model of high art. In response, Alloway argued that art should depart from pre-war elitist ideals of high thought and art, promoting a more accessible and directly engaged commentary on culture.

“... Mass production techniques, applied to accurately repeatable words, pictures, and music, have resulted in an expendable multitude of signs and symbols. To approach this exploding field with Renaissance based ideas of the uniqueness of art is crippling. Acceptance of mass media entails a shift in our notion of what culture is. Instead of reserving the word for the highest artifacts and the noblest of thoughts of history’s top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of what society does.” ²

As we sink deeper into the Information Age, the noise of headlines, bold print, and imagery has led to an exhaustion of mass media. Generation Z has become a catalyst for a mass withdrawal from the mainstream, co-opting strategies from fiercely gatekept subcultures and niche networks. Nostalgia-obsessed, Generation Z increasingly appropriates punk, indie-sleaze, and Y2K aesthetics (among others), resulting in a surface-level performance of identity. In an attempt to withdraw from consumerist goods and validation, Generation Z’s shift toward socialization and identity has created a new playground for mass marketing.

Social media is used by nearly 70% of the population. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram collect user interactions to organize a personalized experience and successfully deploy niche marketing. In this era of data mining, Generation Z interests have dictated the direction of mass media’s expansion.

The allure of being an “individual” has become a consumable product, organizing and progressing the consumerist positive feedback loop. To disrupt this cycle, one must first recognize how body and individual expression are sold back to its performer.

As an act of intervention and reclamation, THE BOYS CLUB brings together artists of various generations and disciplines who use the methodologies of Pop Art to interrogate the power systems bolstered by mass communication. Featuring demographics not originally included in the Independent Group (queer and femme), the exhibition presents work by Nina Hartmann, Troy Montes Michie, Marilyn Minter, Natalie Ochoa, Erica Rutherford, Beverly Semmes, and Susan Weil.

- Cortney Connolly

“Pop appealed widely because, on the surface, it mimicked public language. The public had little idea of the investigative codes of these artists, many antagonistic to illustration and commercial art." 

 

- Sid Sachs

"Beyond the Surface: Women and Pop Art 1958- 1968"

Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958- 1968

p. 30 

¹ Leach, William R. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books , 19932 

² Alloway, Lawrence. “The Long Front o f Culture,” 1959, p 1.3 Expert Panel.

³ “Council Post: How to Appeal to Gen-Z without Obviously 'Marketing to Gen-Z.'” Forbes , 12 Aug. 2024, 

www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2022/08/24/how-to-appeal-to-gen-z-without-obviously-marketing-to-gen-z/.