"Younger artists in the dreary, austere Britain of the early 1950s began to reject the modernist disdain for the garish hucksterism of capitalist salesmanship."

"[In 1957, one theorist said Pop Art should be] popular, transient, expendable, gimmicky, glamorous, and—he used the term explicitly—big business. Such a frank alliance between avant-garde art and capitalism was made possible by the cold war. The rivalry with communism gave consumerism an appearance of depth. It was not, as elitist critics had long maintained, shallow and meretricious. Consumerism stood for what Harry Truman called, in the 1947 speech that inaugurated the cold war, a 'way of life.' Communism imposed everything from above. But capitalism—in its own self-image—created infinite choice. Its claim (seldom borne out in reality) was that it allowed the consumer to make all the decisions. Coke or Pepsi, Gillette or Wilkinson Sword, Max Factor or Revlon—it’s entirely up to you... It is not the artist but the viewer, listener, reader, or audience member who creates the meaning of the work. The aim of aesthetic creation is to make the producer disappear and leave only the object and the consumer.... At the heart of the self-image of the West in the cold war was a powerful but often amorphous idea: freedom....What, in any case, was freedom, and to whom did it belong? The desire for the art object to be free came easily enough to artists who were male and white...."

From "Freedom for Sale/In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde" by Fintan O’Toole (NY Review of Books)(reviewing "The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War" by Louis Menand).