Clichés on Display

The assessments regularly put forward until the mid-1960s under the keyword ‘pop’ contribute to a recurrent association of popular artifacts with the modern, avant-garde anti-Aristotelian project. They also confer a positive connotation on the ‘entertaining’ by identifying it with the ‘playful’ and the ‘free.’ Above all, they point out (for the first time) that elements that had been widely devalued as ‘clichés’ in the past can possess an artistic quality of their own, insofar as they are stylized in a particular—anti-realist, anti-individual, anti-expressive, anti-psychological—way. Over the coming decades, both individually and in combination, these will be taken up repeatedly in order to declare popular artifacts to be (good) works of art.