Pop art’s ironic critique was inverted and co-opted by the market.

Evidence

Many artworks indeed ‘seem to have been conceived by their authors as ironic goods’ (Palmier 2006, p. 10). Pop art’s original intention of using an ironic concept of art as commodityproductionandof artworksascommoditiesinordertogettotheheartof theworld of commodities did not ultimately work in its favour. Instead, pop art saw the inversion of its argument become legitimated, which maintains that if all art is equally commodity, then all commodities are also art. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 865

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standard critique that the avant-garde’s negation gets recuperated — echoes Boltanski-Chiapello and Peter Bürger on avant-garde failure. — connects to: Street art’s anticommercial critique was absorbed back into the market — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 255; Pop royalty reframed wealth as revolutionary while denouncing capitalist labels. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 638
• QUESTION: The inversion ‘if all art is commodity, then all commodities are art’ — is this the editor’s own formulation or drawn from a source? Would be worth pinning down.

Broader Connections

• Pop royalty reframed wealth as revolutionary while denouncing capitalist labels. #exemplifies (0.92) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 638
• Street art’s anticommercial critique was absorbed back into the market #exemplifies (0.90) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 255