The item I chose to represent me is an americano that my friend ordered when we were in Korea. I chose this because of how often I would go to cafes there either by myself or with friends and how much I enjoyed trying different types of coffee and other drinks. It became so much a part of my everyday life there, largely because of the incredible prevalence of coffee shops in Seoul and because of how socially acceptable it was to spend most of your time going to them.
Andy Warhol seemed to explore several main ideas through his artwork. One of them was how we could take everyday objects and by examining them more closely, find new meaning in them. He also liked to subvert our expectations by placing ordinary things where we wouldn’t normally see them. By doing this, he created advertisements that resonated with people in new ways – focusing so closely on the products themselves that we as consumers are forced to consider them, and perhaps even think about them in a way we hadn’t before. I think his ideas on popular culture are very accurate – how many times has something ordinary blown up simply because some people thought of using it in a different way than was conventionally acceptable (looking at you, Tide pods)? Popular culture is determined by the people, and we as a society can choose to give attention to whatever we want, regardless of its objective importance in real life.
I think that my item has a strong relationship to popular culture, at least in Korea. In Seoul, new cafes and cafe trends are very important to the cultural scene among young people – it’s a very popular hobby to go visit the newest and hottest coffee shops to take pictures and post them on Instagram. And often, younger workers would buy coffee for their senior company members as a sign of friendliness and appreciation. The americano my friend bought is just a small object symbolic of a whole culture of cafe-going and coffee-buying that exists in Korea.
In the way that Warhol used machines to automate his artwork, I feel as though we’re doing much the same in this class with PS and Illustrator. While there is merit to using traditional mediums of art, digital art has certainly taken tasks such as advertisement creating to new levels of ease and efficiency. I think learning these technologies has definitely given me a new perspective on the things you can accomplish with digital art that you couldn’t with traditional mediums.