Art and everyday life

What happens when art leaves the museum and enters everyday life?

By the end of the 1950s many artists no longer seemed interested in answering this question theoretically. Instead they began testing it in practice. Consumer goods appeared in galleries, artistic events moved into public space, and everyday experience itself became artistic material. Art was no longer expected to stand apart from life. It was expected to become part of it.

The relationship between art and everyday life became a central concern of many postwar artists. Rather than treating everyday life as something external to art, they increasingly viewed it as the very place where art should happen. This shift could be seen across a wide range of artistic practices, from Pop Art and Happenings to installations and participatory forms of art. Despite their differences, these practices shared a common ambition — to challenge the separation between art and ordinary experience.

Of course this idea did not emerge out of nowhere.

Several decades earlier, Dada had already challenged traditional artistic values, questioning what could be considered art in the first place. Its most influential figure, Marcel Duchamp, pushed this challenge further through his ready-mades. In The Richard Mutt Case (1917), written in defense of Fountain, Duchamp argued that an ordinary object could become art through the artist’s choice.

Yet Duchamp’s gesture still depended on the institution of art. A urinal became art because it entered the artistic context. By the 1950s and 1960s, however, manny artists wanted to push this logic further. Their goal was not simply to bring everyday objects into art, but to question whether art and everyday life needed to remain separate at all.

This shift was accompanied by important philosophical developments.

In Eye and Mind (1961), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is always embodied and rooted in lived experience. We do not observe the world from a distance — we exist within it. Around the same time, Guy Debord, writing for the Situationist International, criticized modern society for transforming lived experience into passive spectacle. In texts later collected as Writings from the Situationist International, he argued that people should actively construct situations rather than merely consume images and representations of reality.

Neither philosopher was writing specifically about Pop Art or Happenings. Nevertheless, their ideas help explain why so many artists became dissatisfied with the isolated art object. If experience itself had become the central question, then perhaps art should be sought not beyond everyday life but within it.

This transformation was also connected to the rapid expansion of mass media and consumer culture after the Second World War.

In The Arts and the Mass Media (1958), Lawrence Alloway rejected the traditional distinction between high and low culture. Advertising, television, magazines, and contemporary art increasingly belonged to the same visual environment. Richard Hamilton developed a similar argument in For the Finest Art, Try Pop (1961), treating consumer imagery not as a threat to art but as one of its most important resources.

These ideas became particularly influential for Pop Art. Instead of resisting consumer culture, many artists began to treat it as artistic material. The supermarket, the billboard, and the magazine page became as relevant to artistic practice as the studio.

No artist expressed this position more clearly than Claes Oldenburg.

His manifesto I Am for an Art… remains one of the most direct statements of the new relationship between art and life. Rather than defining art through aesthetic criteria Oldenburg described an art connected to food, streets, bodies, accidents, shops, and ordinary routines. The list is deliberately excessive, almost chaotic, as if the point were to demonstrate that nothing in everyday life should be excluded from artistic attention.

This approach can be seen in works such as The Store (1961), an installation consisting of handmade replicas of commercial goods, and Floor Burger (1962), which transformed a familiar consumer object into a monumental sculptural form. In both cases, the everyday object remains recognizable. Art does not transcend reality. It exaggerates it.

Similar concerns appeared in the work of Allan Kaprow and Piero Manzoni.

In Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (1959–65), Kaprow argued that art should become an event rather than a static object. His 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) blurred the distinction between performer and spectator, artwork and experience. Manzoni’s Free Dimension (1960) questioned the limits of artistic production itself, suggesting that art could no longer be reduced to a physical object.

At the same time, artists such as Andy Warhol explored everyday life through the imagery of consumer culture. Works like Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) transformed a familiar supermarket product into one of the most recognizable images of twentieth-century art, while Brillo Boxes (1964) further blurred the distinction between commercial packaging and artistic object. In both cases everyday consumer goods became central subjects of artistic practice.

The desire to integrate art and everyday life extended far beyond the 1960s. It shaped Pop Art, Performance Art, Installation Art, Conceptual Art, and later participatory practices. In Untitled (Free) (1992), Rirkrit Tiravanija transformed the gallery into a space for everyday social interaction, inviting visitors to share a meal rather than contemplate an art object.

The same interest in ordinary experience can be found in Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) by Sarah Lucas. Using everyday food items and domestic associations, the work demonstrates how familiar objects can be recontextualized to address broader questions of identity, gender, and social life. Similar strategies remain widespread in contemporary art, where ordinary objects, routines, and experiences continue to serve as artistic material.

What began with Duchamp’s ordinary object eventually became something much larger. By the end of the twentieth century, artists were no longer asking whether everyday life could enter art. The more difficult question was the one implied by Oldenburg’s manifesto from the beginning:

If art takes its form from the lines of life itself, where exactly does art end and everyday life begin?