'Export Britain': Pop Art, Mass Culture and the Export Drive

• Autores: Lisa Tickner
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 35, Nº. 2, 2012 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Art and the Cultural Field, 1939�69 Edited by Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett), págs. 394-419
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In the early 1960s, and accelerating with the advent of ‘swinging London’, a kind of feedback loop developed between popular culture and the mass media, pop art, and the projection of a new British identity – ‘Creative Britain’ – as part of the export drive. The asymmetry between national economic crisis and local art-world prosperity helped create conditions in which a thriving British culture could be promoted abroad. The British Council, operating with funds discretely diverted from the Board of Trade, was active in providing the ‘cultural quid pro quo’ demanded at trade events, and a new generation of artists provided the stimulus for a shift from ‘heritage’ to ‘modern’ values in the projection of national identity. This essay sets out to map the intersections of art, design, politics and trade at three events in 1967: ‘British Week’ in Brussels, ‘British Fortnight’ at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and the British Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal.