Pop Art began as a British provocation in the mid-1950s — a group of artists and critics at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, calling themselves the Independent Group, started collecting American consumer culture imagery: advertisements, film stills, product packaging, comic strips. Richard Hamilton's 1956 collage *Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?* assembled these fragments into a single image and asked an uncomfortable question: if mass media images are everywhere, why isn't anyone treating them as art?

The American version, which arrived in New York around 1962 and became the defining version, was less ironic and more immersive. Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Roy Lichtenstein's comic-panel paintings (1961–) didn't just reference commercial visual culture — they replicated its techniques with deadpan precision. Warhol used commercial silkscreen printing. Lichtenstein simulated Ben-Day dots, the mechanical printing process used in cheap newspaper comics. The methods of mass reproduction became fine art methods.

The effect was deliberately destabilizing: if the visual language of advertising and comics could fill a canvas in a major gallery, the distinction between high art and commercial art became a question rather than a fact.