Chennai goes pop!

While the art scene in the city has been going great guns, pop art seems to be having its impact as well. Popular culture now seems to have taken the art world here by storm.
When we asked noted art connoisseur Sharan Apparao as to why pop art was getting more popular in Chennai, she said, “I think people are now recognising the fact that popular culture is also a form of art.Also, that there is merit in looking at what the masses look at in whatever form it can be viewed at. It is also the re-packaging that helps giving it a different view that attracts attention.” The USP of pop art according to Sharan is how it is translated as well as the associated memory.
The transference of street imagery into the sphere of fashion, lifestyle and the art world itself, possibly had its biggest impact when Andy Warhol took it and made it popular.
Now pop art is not restricted to the ‘canvas’ but has moved on to furniture, furnishings, clothes, accessories and even crockery. Ketna Patel, for instance, an award-winning pop artist who is a Singapore-based, has held several shows here in Chennai of her work – she dabbles in limited-edition art pieces that include furniture. But there are others — like graphic designers in the city — who have taken a fancy to this medium of expression.
In India, there’s increasing popularity of this form of work but if one were to invest in them, would these art pieces have any resale value? Yes, say art experts, but again it depends on the artist and the quality of work. “Pop art or popular culture is one root or basis for an artist...so it is as good as another form of art. It is the end outcome and what it is that makes the difference not whether it is ‘pop or classical or new’ or x,” says Sharan.
What is pop art?
It is defined as popular art and emerged from the pen of English critic Lawrence Alloway in the late 1950s to describe what he viewed as a contemporary attitudinal shift in subject matter and techniques of art. Beginning in England in the mid-1950s and America in early ‘60s, pop art focussed on everyday objects rendered through an adoption of commercial art techniques. In doing so, artists availed themselves of images and ideas culled from popular culture, including movies, comic books, advertising, and especially, television - faithfully reproduced in all their mass-produced glory.