Pop art is a term dating from the 1950s coined by Lawrence Alloway, a British art critic. It came to be broadly used to refer to fine art which draws from popular culture, epitomized by work by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. British pop artists of the 1960s included Clive Barker, Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allen Jones, and R.B.Kitaj (the US-born but London-based artist who in fact refuses the term).

Though the quintessential pop artist was Andy Warhol, the general ethic of a removed, detached, disinterestedly cool and analytical approach to the importing of ‘low’ cultural images and styles into ‘high’ culture was extremely widespread. Pop art drew its chief influences from the mass media, advertising, graphic styles, comic strips and celebrity icons. In later decades it has been attacked as reactionary and as pandering to a consumerist society which values both mass-produced commodities and the least demanding art form— realism. The term neo-pop is used to refer to younger, pop-influenced artists such as Jeff Koons.