This coincided with a youth revolution. Rock and Roll became popular. Young people suddenly had disposable income and started to adopt the fashions of American cultural icons. American industrial design and streamlining technology also had an impact.
The "Americanisation" of British culture was opposed by some people. American design was mistrusted and seen as vulgar and commercial. Some felt that traditional British culture -especially traditional working class values - were being replaced by shallow American commercial culture. Richard Hoggart, for example, was a Marxist scholar who wrote that consumerism and popular culture were used to distract society and perpetuate the capitalist system. That was a very negative view of popular culture. Hoggart looked at the spectre of Americanisation with a puritan notion of American culture swamping more-authentic British forms.
But there were others who had a more considered response. A group of artists called the Independent Group held an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery called This Is Tomorrow(1956). The Independent Group included Richard Hamilton, Edouardo Paolozzi and Reyner Banham. They met to analyse the icons of American mass culture. The exhibition recycled imagery from American sci-fi and pulp fiction. It included a statue of Robby the Robot from the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, a lifesize cut-out of Marilyn Monroe and a jukebox. The catalogue featured essays by the critics Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway. This was the beginnings of Pop Art.
The Independent Group were fascinated with popular culture, which they felt was transforming the drabness of British design. They celebrated it because it was democratic, in the sense that it was cheap, disposable and easily understood, as well as being full of optimism for the future. But they also regarded it as alien, and kept it at a distance in order to analyse its techniques.
Peter Blake is a British artist who designed the cover of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper. He produced a self portrait that is very self-deprecating. He depicts himself as a blank-faced, bland figure clutching an Elvis Presley album. His denim jacket is covered with badges. This is a deliberately naïve celebration of American popular culture. He is defining his identity in terms of cultural icons and signs from across the Atlantic. This suggests something of the absurdity of these images in a mundane working class British context. It shows that British Pop artists were casting an analytical eye over it.
One of the leading figures was the artist Richard Hamilton. He taught at Newcastle School of Art. He created a collage inspired by the Surrealist collages of Max Ernst. The title is Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? It parodies the language of advertising. It compiles imagery from American magazines. There is a Ford logo; a comic book on the wall in place of a painting; Charles Atlas and a pin-up model. The ceiling is actually a photograph of the moon - this reflects contemporary interest in astronomy and the Space Race. It chronicles the arrival of new consumer goods and the emergence of the consumer society that is still with us.
