Where’s the fun, Barbican? 

Pop Art Design, curated by the Vitra Design Museum and currently at the Barbican, opens with Richard Hamilton’s 1956 ‘Just what makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’. Made as a poster for the Whitechapel show This is Tomorrow, it’s a witty collage of consumer fantasies scissored out of magazines, reminding us that interest in popular culture among British artists operated as a humorous, semi-anthropological collegiate research project. In part, British Pop was a riposte to the lushness of American consumerism from a small island that had won the war but had lost the peace. Pop Art in the United States got under way later and many American Pop artists had had first-hand experience of commercial art. Andy Warhol had been an illustrator, James Rosenquist a billboard artist, Edward Ruscha a typographer, while the sculptor Richard Artschwager had worked as a trade furniture-maker. Their work dominates the early part of Pop Art Design, together with some of their source material — a nicely battered Coca-Cola vending machine, for instance.