Popular Format

Description:

Popular Format was a series of five exhibitions featuring artists who approached popular culture from many directions and produced work that was both accessible and conceptually complex.

Discourses between “popular culture” and the contemporary arts have been important themes in both modern and postmodern thinking. While postmodernism has attempted to conflate the modernist “high/low” dialectic, tensions between popular culture and contemporary art continue to exist. The Duchampian "ready-made" has manifested in music and video sampling, a practice that is being carried on by video artists, filmmakers, photographers, DJs, musicians, and sound artists alike. Contemporary artists also frequently alter and create meaning by re-contextualizing and re-rendering cultural material. 

Curated by Jonathan Middleton.