This study is based upon the retrospective and now widespread identification of American pop art of the sixties as an expression of post-modernism. More specifically, this identification concerns New York pop, the form associated with the leading centre of art in both America and the world during this period. The immediate stimulus for this study lies in the question: Did the post-modernist art of American pop art in its initial form in the sixties give rise to a corresponding critical consciousness? In other words, can critical responses to pop during this same period also be retrospectively identified as post-modernist? This question determines the central task of this study: the recognition and establishment of the nature of post-modernist features in the critical consciousness generated by American pop art during the sixties. The retrospectivity of this endeavour should be stressed. What is offered by this work is a comparison between the ideas of a select group of American critics writing in the 1960s in response to the challenge of pop art, ideas that bear a striking similarity to that body of thought and opinion that is now associated with post-modernism. Hans Bertens's history of post-modernism, published in 1995, provides a precedent for this study's retrospective argument.

Leo Steinberg was born in Moscow in 1920. Formal study included that undertaken in England at the Slade School of Art and the University of London for which he received a diploma (fine arts) in 1940. He arrived in the United States in 1945, the country in which he would henceforth reside and, later, take out citizenship. Further study followed at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, for which he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1960. It was not until 1953, the year in which he turned thirty-three, that Steinberg published his inaugural essay on twentieth-century art. Over the following eighteen years, however, he amassed a considerable body of writing on art from this period. This comprised essays and to a lesser extent reviews, the latter being a legacy of his ten-month stint as a reviewer for Arts magazine during part of 1955 and 1956. It was of a size and substance sufficient to warrant publication in 1972 in the form of the anthology entitled Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. In retrospect, Steinberg's writings on both modern and contemporary art were only an adjunct to those produced in his primary vocational role of academic and historian of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian art. They provide, nonetheless, valuable insights into the critical consciousness of the sixties and shortly thereafter, the time span of this study.

Max Kozloff was born in Chicago in 1933. In 1953 he graduated in Arts from the University of Chicago and five years later was awarded an M.A. by the same institution. Subsequent study, though not completed, brought him to New York where he enrolled at the Institute of Fine Arts. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarsip in 1962, the year following Rose's receipt of the same award, Kozloff spent a year in France. By this time he had already commenced his career as a critic – primarily of American art – for which he would soon receive numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Fellowship for Critical Writing in 1962–3, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism in 1966 and a Guggenheim Fellowship 1968–9. Renderings, an anthology of criticism from this period, was published in 1968. In the next decade Kozloff took on the further role of photographer and broadened his critical and writing focus to encompass photography. One-man exhibitions of his photographs were held at the Holly Solomon Gallery, New York, in 1977, 1979, and 1980, and a further one at the Marlborough Gallery, New York, in 1982. In 1979 he published Photography and Fascination, followed by The Privileged Eye in 1987. During the sixties, Kozloff's prime critical platform was The Nation where he held the position of art critic, 1961–9. Further critical posts occupied during this period were those of New York correspondent, Art International, 1962–4, and contributing editor, Artforum, 1963–74.

It has been argued in this study that during the sixties in America a post-modernist critical consciousness arose in response to those aspects of American, or, more accurately, New York pop that could not be adequately accommodated within existing formalist and realist critical canons. In the face of their abject failure to come to terms with the character of an art as complex as pop, together with the character of the society that gave it birth, critics turned to a range of radical sociological and philosophical theories. These same theories, as in the prominent cases of pragmatism and phenomenology, we may now retrospectively identify with deconstructive notions of post-modernism and post-modernity.

Critical interest in pop art (or, for that matter, the production of art indebted to pop ideas) did not suddenly cease with the time frame of this study: the sixties and shortly thereafter. To the contrary, pop art's unabated relevance is attested by the substantial body of literature on the subject that stretches in an unbroken fashion from the movement's inception to the present time. Post-modernism's emergence as a worldview in the midseventies, however, undoubtedly endowed pop with a further lease of life: by affirming the movement's significance, it stimulated a new wave of critical attention. As Lynne Cooke has rightly pointed out, the principal issues of “simulation and appropriation” and “commodification of the artwork” in Warhol's pop especially (particularly the last) coincided with those at the heart of the post-modernist controversy of the eighties.

In the previous section we have seen how the post-modernist features of the critical responses of social critics to pop can be identified by the recourse to a sociological model of post-modernism, a model that posits a relationship between post-modernity, the characteristics of which are reflected in pop art, and post-modernism. This section will examine the responses of two further critics, Barbara Rose and Max Kozloff. While neither critic ignored pop art's patent relationship to the post-war urban societal form (post-modernity), they accounted for the post-modernist features of pop primarily on philosophical grounds. In the pursuit of a means of theorizing pop and other sixties' art that was inadequately accommodated as well as negatively evaluated by Greenbergian formalism – and, hence, by its underlying foundationalist beliefs – Rose and Kozloff formulated systems underpinned by provisional values that were responsive to the value-system of each work and, in the case of Kozloff, of the critic or experiencing subject. These were predicated on either the tenets of philosophical pragmatism in the case of Rose, or with Kozloff of phenomenology.

Pragmatism and phenomenology are linked by their common recognition of the intentional ties that bind one to the world, as well as the role played by these in the constitution of knowledge about that world.

Lawrence Alloway, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg are united by a common, if broadly defined, methodological approach to pop art. It was one that sought to explain the iconographic, stylistic, and formal features of this movement in terms of the deconstructive effect of key technological and economic characteristics of post-war Western urban society: mass communications and capitalist consumerism. In seeking authority for this approach, these critics discredited, if in varying ways, the prevailing modernist paradigm of Greenbergian formalism as well as the traditional representational paradigm in both the art and literature of realism.

Within this area of consensus each critic presented a distinct argument concerning the perceived bond between pop art and the deconstructive character of mass communications and consumerism. Rosenberg regarded pop as evidence of the “de-definition” of art; Alloway saw it as a mirror of the spectrum of visual communications as well as representative of a constitutive channel (painting) and, in its communicative function, as equally “de-defined”; Steinberg identified the “flatbed” picture plane as that characteristic of “post-Modernist” painting, including pop. Steinberg's case, as with Alloway's, centres on the pop artists' use of pre-existing signs disseminated by mass communications in the post-war period as well as on the role played by these signs in the creation of a mediate world. It is, however, more theoretical and more rigorously medium-specific, its credibility dependent on “deconstructing” Greenberg's distinction between the types of illusion inherent in modernist and traditional painting.

Harold Rosenberg's writings on pop art throughout the sixties, in which he constantly demonstrates pop's questioning and blurring of the boundaries between mass and fine art, provide the most compelling evidence of grounds for art's anxious condition – those derived from the key technological and economic characteristics of post-war society – as opposed to evidence of the condition itself. According to Rosenberg, anxious art confronts its situation and exercises art's prerogative to make itself anew, while its anxiety is evidence of art's survival in the face of a situation that militates against its very being. Pop, in Rosenberg's terms, is evidence of a stilling of art's disquiet. With its seeming acquiescence to art's “deformation” and “loss of identity,” pop renounces the “intellectual and emotional” element in modern art that stems from confronting the truth of its condition, replacing it, presumably, by a craftsman's satisfaction “in doing.”

Rosenberg's account of pop art's threatened merger with mass communication forms places it within the ambit of the delegitimizing interests of post-modernism, those that propose an end to categorical distinctions based upon hierarchies of taste, opinion, and knowledge as well as an end to the power of singular authorities, such as the art museum, to dictate categorical distinctions along these lines.

The aim of this section is not to attempt to answer the difficult and fraught question “What is post-modernism?” It is rather to establish a range of post-modernist assumptions that will be used throughout this study to identify what can now be regarded as aspects of post-modernist thought in critical responses to American pop art during the sixties. Both these assumptions and their relevance to the critics under review will be discussed in a schematic manner so as not to pre-empt discussion in subsequent sections of this study.

“Post-modernist” responses to pop were prompted by those features that resisted accommodation within existing formalist or realist critical canons. The most prominent of these is anonymity, that is lack of “authorial presence” or a “centred sense of personal identity.” This is evident in its depersonalized technique, minimal, if any, transformation of source material, and obscure or uninterpretable “message.” A further feature concerns the collapsing of distinctions between élite and mass cultural realms, evident in pop art's indebtedness to the codes, subjects, and, in some instances, technical processes of mass communications. Finally, there is that of the representation of “culture” as opposed to “nature,” the province of realism, insofar as it concerns the simulation of pre-existing signs. Critics theorized these features along either sociological or philosophical lines. They viewed them as reflective of Western urban society in its post-war capitalist-consumerist phase or, alternatively, as eliminative of a world-view in the sense of an authoritative, totalizing system of thought.

Susan Sontag's both public and highly successful career has encompassed the roles of cultural essayist, writer of fiction and, since 1969, filmmaker. It began in earnest in 1959 after her arrival in New York, the city of her birth, at the age of twenty-six. Armed with a B.A. from the University of Chicago (1952) and M.A.s in both English (1954) and Philosophy (1955) from Harvard, Sontag was fresh from further study in England (St. Anne's College, Oxford) and France (University of Paris) and, shortly thereafter, the dissolution of her youthful marriage to the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff. After an initial one-year stint as contributing editor of Commentary, Sontag supported herself by the combined proceeds of her writing, teaching posts, and grants, including those awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965 and the Guggenheim in the following year. The sixties, the inaugural phase of her writing career, proved to be highly productive; between 1962 and 1965, alone, Sontag produced some twenty-six essays and her first work of fiction, The Benefactor, while for the greater part of this period holding down a teaching position in the department of religion, Columbia University.

In her capacity as a cultural essayist, Sontag wrote a number of articles on contemporary art during the sixties. Contemporary art was discussed in these in a both far-reaching and inter-disciplinary manner, one that was consistent with her friendship, contracted shortly after her arrival in New York, with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns.