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The Unpop Art Interviews
Edited and introduced by Brian M. Clark
Genre: Interviews / Art History / Online Culture
Length: 152 pages
Language: English
Published: May 31, 2025
Dimensions: 5 x 0.35 x 7 inches
ISBN: 979-8-9992116-4-4
Price: $11.95
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Description:
The Unpop Art movement was a quasi-formal collective of American creatives whose work grappled with similar "unpopular" themes using "pop" stylings and aesthetics. It existed as a largely online phenomenon from 2004 to 2009, during the early days of social media. The Unpop Art Interviews is a compact collection of seven text interviews with Unpop Art co-founder and website operator Brian M. Clark, regarding his perspective on the conceptual underpinnings of Unpop Art.
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From the inside book jacket:
"Unpop Art [was] a collective of artists who created a rage—and outrage—in the art world. ... Unpop artists basically apply pop aesthetics to unpopular concepts. Typically, very unpopular concepts. ... Offensive? Almost certainly. ... But [not just] art merely for shock value."
– Rockstar Magazine, 2006
North Hollywood, California, USA
"Unpop Art [was] ... a movement full of absences: ideals, moralism, preconceptions, clichés. It's their opposite. It's a perpetual demystification of pop values that often have nothing innovative to say about art, but rather, demean and limit it. ... In Unpop, everything is turned upside down; satire, combined with creativity and the 'classical' means of art, [became] the movement's weapons. ... Unpop [was] the cry of 'politically incorrect' artists, forced to wander in the limbo of the artistic underground, rather than succumb to the overused and banal still lifes and bucolic landscapes that dominate the windows of today's art galleries. Unpop artists instead focus[ed] their attention on what's rotten in our world; to satirize it, to provoke reflection, and to exorcise the daily problems of an ever-sinking world with a bit of healthy amorality, always maintaining a certain detachment and intellectual ambiguity."
– CartaIgienica, 2005
Rome, Italy
"Unpop Art showcase[d] the use of popular icons and designs to display controversial and often distasteful content."
– Metro, 2004
San Jose, California, USA
"Unpop Art [was] a grouping of artists aware that resistance is barren, limited, that their own efforts are nothing but a few pebbles in front of the hundreds of floors of the modern Tower of Babel. They don't commit suicide, they don't take to the streets for guerrilla actions, either; instead, they attack the system where (in their opinion, at least) it hurts – in the distortion [of] images. ... But mainly, Unpop Art [was] directed towards the artists of the generation, against the revolutionaries of the chair, against the punks who make the mistake of thinking that someone in this world cares about their opinions, against everything and anyone who serves—in the submissive kneeling they call 'struggle'—the system. ... But Unpop Art does not symbolize the beginning, continuation, or end of a struggle, it symbolizes the futility of such from the beginning."
– NRG Maariv, 2004
Tel Aviv, Israel
"Talk about fun ... Unpop Art, [brought] absolutely no Warholian glamour along with it. ... How totally un-Pop."
– Westword, 2004
Denver, Colorado, USA
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