Two International Pop Art Exhibits Reveal The Creative Side Of Globalization

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Visiting Tokyo in the early 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg was flattered to receive a gift from the Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara, an imitation of a Rauschenberg sculpture that Shinohara had seen in a magazine. But Rauschenberg’s delight soon gave way to gloom. The copy Shinohara gave him was one of ten. What seemed at first to be an act of appropriation – a standard move in the Pop Art playbook – instead threatened the market value of Rauschenberg’s own output.

Shinohara knew exactly what he was doing. Tweaking American worries about Japanese piracy of cars and consumer goods, Shinohara’s Imitation Art made Pop menacing. “One imitation is philosophy, but ten of them makes it production,” he slyly said, voicing a prickly Pop paradox. “The first one to imitate will win!”

​Ushio Shinohara is one of the hundreds of non-American artists whose contributions to Pop Art have been underrecognized for the past half century. Two major exhibitions, one at the Tate Modern andthe other at the Dallas Museum of Art, together represent a laudable effort to remap the most popular of 20th century movements.

What emerges is a story of globalization in which the cultural exports of American artists including Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein (as well as Brits such as Richard Hamilton) were rapidly taken up in countries ranging from Japan to the Soviet Union – but with an unexpected outcome: Instead of the homogeneity wrought by most global trade, international artists responded by transforming what they received.

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