The Empire of signs

Episode number 7 of Series “American visions”.
This episode deals with some of the truths and illusions in America’s development as a huge-scale cultural consumer from 1950 through the end of the 1970s. It can be seen, in retrospect, how cultural patterns follow changes of attitude socially and politically. “Having the bomb confirmed the old belief in American exceptionalism,” says Hughes. The last half of the twentieth century was to be “The American Century” and, between 1945 and the late 1960s, New York succeeded Paris as the Western world’s art capital. The American styles that carried its reputation were Abstract Expressionism. The work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and others, and its successor, Pop Art. The Pop Art movement was created by figures such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Hughes considers how Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art fit into a global America of nuclear anxiety and chromium opulence, and what happens to the avant-garde when the pursuit of the new becomes America’s official culture. Written and presented by Robert Hughes.