Abstract

If it is true that Pop Art is the logical extension of Ready-Made, it is to the extent that Pop Art shows, symptomatically, the premise that creative act is no less the naming one as "this is art," so that each speaker is virtually an artist. In the relation to this premise, how was vulgarity questioned in the critical discourse on Pop Art? The "cool" expression of Pop Art cannot free from the ambivalence of interpretation. Under such condition, three discursive circuits were set up around the vulgarity of Pop Art. First, the vulgarity was negatively interpreted as a peculiarity of degraded American society. Then, Pop Art was "naively" defined as the effective criticism of the society. And finally, the individual visions of Pop Artists were discovered behind their vulgarity. In either circuit, the criticisms avoided the problem that art was reduced to the only utterance, protecting the opposition of the artists against the society. By the same token, Ready-Made was interpreted as an pop icon of the contemporary society or its vicious symbol, and the "optical indifference" as the characteristic of Ready-Made was completely negated. Such distortion of the discourse is a symptomatic reaction to the reductive premise