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Popular Culture Review
by the influential collectors Ben Heller, James Thrall Soby, Nelson Rockefeller,
Philip Johnson, Dorothy Miller, and Alfred Barr.
The artist's quick rise to fame was noted by the collector Ben Heller who
criticized the “Johns myth” around 1959:
Johns has been as much a pawn in the current world game of
power politics as the bearer of a new or individual image. As a
result of this....[he] risks the subtle, swift and cruel fate befalling
one who becomes a fad. He has perhaps suffered as much as
gained by his notoriety and success, (qtd. in Crichton 37)
According to Heller, originality made work by Johns highly marketable, but the
very same commercial success could result in over-exposure and curtail long term
success. Although Heller’s warning proved to be unnecessary as Johns’ visibility
within the art world continued to enhance his reputation, one reaction to the charge
that commercial success might lead to faddishness was for the artist and critics to
conflate popular taste with aesthetic value. Accordingly the Ballantine ale cans of
the Painted Bronze were used to equate the reception of art with the consumption
of alcohol. The idea for this visual pun referring to consuming art was developed
in Johns’ “Sketchbook Notes” published in 1965, which postulated that, “ ‘Looking’
is and is not ‘eating’ and ‘being eaten’” (Johns 185).
Other Pop artists, including Claes Oldenburg, were more overt in asserting
that the comparison of saleable art with consumer goods demonstrated art had
greater value — “since the works could not be mistaken for the original consumer
products but had to be acknowledged as art for sale” (qtd. in Mamiya 46)L
The greater acclaim that was accorded to original art over mass-produced
commercial goods infonns the commentary praising Painted Bronze in ternis of
the artist’s commitment to craftsmanship\ Critic and social historian Max Kozloff,
critical of commercial success, commented on the skill Johns needed to copy the
cans and the transformation of the mass-produced consumer goods into a unique
work of art:
With those lab oriously hand-painted versions o f the
manufactured: flags, targets, and beer cans, in which he is not
the least anxious to conceal the traces and imperfections of
brushstrokes he makes the mass-produced unique, (qtd. in
Crichton 43)
Painted Bronze was made using plaster of paris in what Johns has described as a