You earned __________ out of 10 points

Read Anne Wagner’s essay “According to What” and answer the following questions.

Describe the 1950s in America.  What were some of the prevailing concerns of the era?  What kinds of things did the "typical" American strive for?  How had the art world changed?  In what direction did Beat artists take the existential crisis of the New York School?

Explain Greenberg’s concepts of the mainstream and kitsch.  How did Beat Generation artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns work to undermine these ideas?

Compare and contrast Jasper John’s Flag with Robert Frank’s Fourth of July.  What thoughts do these works convey about America and its powerful symbol, the flag?  In other words, is the flag and what it represents being questioned here?  Why or why not?

Jonathan Fineberg writes, “Jasper Johns formulated a pointedly nonintrospective style that stressed the complex semiotics of the art object (in other words, how it means what it means).”  Supporting this interpretation, Jasper Johns said of his work, “I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.  Abstract Expressionism was so lively – personal identity and painting were more or less the same … But I found I couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings.  So I worked in such a way that I could say that it’s not me.”  Do you feel that Johns’s work is nonintrospective and impersonal?  Explain.  Why do you think that Johns would have wanted his work to be perceived as impersonal?