In the mid-20th century, a battle was brewing in the art world. Commercialization began to mass produce art in all its varieties, from comics to magazines, to gift boxes, to billboards, everything! What an amazing thing is happening! Art was now widely available to the general public. However, with so many replicas being created, what would define the value of the art? Critic Clement Greenberg was the artistic community's voice of condemnation, denouncing this movement for decades throughout the 1940s and 1950s. His thesis was that popular culture and traditional art were simply an aesthetic photocopy, to take money from consumers and offer no further meaning or significance. He claimed that it was an empty, tasteless Western plague infecting the world with its ostentatious decorations and cheap advertisements. The derogatory term “kitsch” was popularized by Greenberg as he used it to describe art marketed as tasteless, unoriginal copies of high-class works. Despite Greenberg's criticism, the popular culture movement continued to flourish, and low culture art was becoming a respectable art form. This was largely due to the efforts of artist Andy Warhol. Warhol removed the separation between high art and low art, reshaped pop culture and placed it in the galleries. The Warhol effect refers not to his signature posterized style, but to a rebellious attack on the elite class and the assumption that mainstream culture rises to prominence. The pop-art movement took objects from our everyday lives and, using mass production techniques, created a thrilling visual image that paid homage to the commercialized art of the time. Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Can" was a reflection of the typical posters and magazine illustrations found everywhere in m...... middle of paper ....... Web. December 15, 2010. Bonito, Virginia A "Goings Essay". Ralphlgoings.com. 30 April 2000. Web. 15 December 2010. .Heiser, Jörg. "Giovanni Baldessari." Editorial. Frieze Magazine, September 2005. Frieze. Network. December 15, 2010. "John Baldessari Biography." Arts-in-Company home page. Network. 15 December 2010. .Lucie-Smith, Edward. RALPH GOINGS: The American Vermeer. Ralph Goings American photorealist painter. 2004. Network. 15 December 2010. .Mattick, Paul. "The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol." Critical Inquiry 24.4 (1998): 965-87. JSTOR. Network. December 15. 2010. .