What is Popular Culture?

  The instant of a passion, like the sound of one hand clapping, Pop Culture, an ambiguous if not misunderstood beacon. Pop Culture gazed upon in a glance either fades or becomes so mainstream that it loses that uniqueness. Maybe that is the catch to observe, to critique, to label something as Pop. That in its own state of individuality creates the momentum from obscure to recognizable as an action or a result from that act of doing. In the social stratus the evolution of Pop Culture is created in a dynamic environment which moves from obscure to the generic and yet according to the systemic definitions identifiable.
    A quick cursory look at the list of what is Pop Culture: mass, people, residual, articulation: in the sense of making a temporary connection. These are quite ambiguous in an approach to something that appears to be so prevalent in a consumerist society. I dare to question this approach, is it cultural to define something as Popular because it has been accepted by the masses? On the other hand, is it due to the commercialization of that which seems to be next new trend we find on the glossy advertisements?
     An initial image association of Pop Culture dates me to Andy Warhol.  Of course, his image of the Campbell’s Soup Can is what I’m truly missing here. At the time, Campbell’s Soup was probably one of the most recognizable consumer products now done as an art form. As a cultural definition of intellectual, spiritual and/or aesthetic, Andy Warhol encompasses that into the Pop Culture format. That is what makes this an interesting twist as we move from a history of Industrialization to the 21st Century. A new definition
of Pop Culture:What distinguishes at any given movement that, which defines culture of the masses, yet remains unique and identifiable from mainstream commercialization? Pop Culture!
   
   

Storey, John (2009), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 5th edition,
edited John Storey, Harlow: Pearson Education.

http://edu.warhol.org/aract_soup.html