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The term Neo-Dada surfaced in New York in the late 1950s and was used to characterize young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose art appeared at odds with the serious emotional and painterly interests of the then-dominant movement, Abstract Expressionism. Neo-Dada quickly became the word of choice in the early 1960s to designate experimental art, including assemblage, performance, Pop art, and nascent forms of minimal and conceptual art.

Collecting the Now offers a new, in-depth look at the economic forces and institutional actors that have shaped the outlines of postwar art history, with a particular focus on American art, 1960–1990. Working through four case studies, Michael Maizels illuminates how a set of dealers and patrons conditioned the iconic developments of this period: the profusions of pop art, the quixotic impossibility of land art, the dissemination of new media, and the speculation-fueled neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s. 
This book addresses a question of pivotal importance to a swath of art history that has already received substantial scholarly investigation. We now have a clear, nuanced understanding of why certain evolutions took place: why pop artists exploded the delimited parameters of aesthetic modernism, why land artists further strove against the object form itself, and why artists returned to (neo-)traditional painting in the 1980s. But remarkably elided by extant scholarship has been the question of how. How did conditions coalesce around pop so that its artists entered into museum collections, and scholarly analyses, at pace unprecedented in the prior history of art? How, when seeking to transcend the delimited gallery object, were land artists able to create monumental (and by extension, monumentally expensive), interventions in the extreme wilds of the Western deserts? And how did the esoteric objects of media art come eventually to scholarly attention in the sustained absence of academic interest or a private market? The answers to these questions lie in an exploration of the financial conditions and funding mechanisms through which these works were created, advertised, distributed, and preserved.

How Pop artists confronted the legacies of modern Empire of Japan and post-1945 American imperialism from the 1960s to the present.

Looking at a pivotal period spanning the 1960s to the present, Hiroko Ikegami explores how artists in Japan, Okinawa, and the United States have adopted Pop strategies to critique legacies of imperialism. 

Ikegami focuses on locales—Tokyo, Okinawa, Minidoka, and New York—that were deeply impacted by the complex relationship between the Japanese and American empires and considers artists across different situations and generations. The book begins with Tokyo Pop artists and graphic designers, including Shinohara Ushio and Tanaami Keiichi, who critically parodied American Pop during the long 1960s. It then turns to Okinawa, where Tom Max probed Okinawans’ convoluted reality regarding the American Occupation and the Vietnam War. Artists in the second half of the volume confronted legacies of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical condition of the present. Roger Shimomura, the third-generation Japanese American who had been incarcerated in the Minidoka camp as a child, dealt with the subject by appropriating motifs of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Takashi Murakami, now a global art star, created otaku-inspired art and capitalized on his country’s experience of the atomic bombs in promoting his “Superflat” enterprise. The book concludes with a new generation of artists protesting repercussions of empire in the twenty-first century. This is the first study to treat artists of post-1945 Japan, Okinawa, and the US diaspora in a single volume as mutually independent yet interrelated, using Pop’s criticality as a connecting thread.

How the classic aesthetic of 1960s pulp comics influenced art, culture, and politics.

As a form of visual art, comic books rely on a distinct and eye-catching aesthetic. This is especially true of the iconic comics, graphic novels, and illustrations of the 1960s and 1970s. The Look of the 1960s explores the sources of inspiration that influenced the world of comics, beginning with the well-known French comics series Barbarella.

Noted comics scholars Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey analyze the impacts of the often-provocative images featured in the comics of the 1960s, which pushed back against French censorship in a politically tense time, and detail how women resisted their objectification in the comic book industry. Barbarella left its mark on the world and gained international attention, inspiring a movie adaptation and changing the look and content of other popular comics. The “Pulp Pop” movement remains relevant today, continuing to influence the art and political world. With new information about artists and an astute analysis of sociopolitical influence, The Look of the 1960s offers deep insights, making it a must read for comics fans all over the world.