The mechanized future of early pop art had become the present, and the liberation from the old values it promised had come to be seen as what it was: an emptying-out process of jumped-up consumer stimulation that left you with very little in the way of tangible values. If pop started out as a way of "liking things," as Andy said, probably quite sincerely, its legacy in the '70s and '80s was more complicated: you can like things all you want, but they will not like you back. In fact, when you're not looking, they will rob you. It's now more or less agreed that the great liberation that was supposed to flow from the new industrial society never actually took place, and even if it did, it ushered in another set of problems. The great leveling of social codes that followed the breakdown of the 1950s order only led to more anxiety. By the '70s, pop art started to look like an embrace of this new consumer-driven social order; it felt a touch corrupt and compromised, and integrated a little too easily into the middle-high strata of public taste.
The above passage is from David Salle's How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art. Yes, bless him, Salle is a fellow adherent of the Oxford comma. Specifically, it's from Salle's overview on Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein became famous in the '60s for his update of the pointillist method. He would take comic book panels, subtly alter their imagery and layout, enlarge them in the form of paintings, which also included enlarging the Ben-Day dots.
Lichtenstein eventually moved onto other subjects, derived from high art rather than pop ephemera. It was a necessary change. His old style had been (re)appropriated by the makers of ironic t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. You could see it as the curse of the SubGenius. But while he changed subject matter, the dots stayed. One might look at them and wonder why he was doing it like that. Salle, a much sought-after painter in his own right, provides some explanation of why Lichtenstein was doing what he did the way he did it.
His insights extend a bit beyond the art world as well. The "emptying-out" he speaks of certainly reached a lot further, and has never ended. The past sixty years or so have seen a great deal of change on the social, economic, and political fronts. It's mostly been a discarding of the old where one waits in vain for the "in with the new" part. So how can you counteract that? It's an open question.
