Dissertation
This essay takes an informative and explorative look at some of
the artists, designers and writers who formed the Independent
Group in the early 1950s, including such influential figures as
Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, John McHale, Lawrence Alloway,
Reyner Banham and Alison and Peter Smithson. As a group they aimed
to raise the status of popular objects and icons within modern
visual culture. Street-smart, anti-academic, and iconoclastic,
they embraced America and rejected the traditional dichotomies
between high and low culture. They used their meetings and
exhibitions to challenge the official modernist assumptions of
British aesthetics and to advocate instead a media-based, consumer-
based aesthetic of change and inclusiveness – an ‘expendable aesthetic.’
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