The Pop Art movement has always been scrutinized for its legitimacy in the world of traditional art. The notion of Pop Art, in the 1960s, appeared to some critics as a simple appropriation, taking an idea from someone else and then making it their own by modifying or decontextualizing it. Mainstream artists, collectors and art lovers found this new challenge of separating high art from low culture difficult with the avant-garde approach taken by pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. This essay will explore the origins of Pop Art and its clashes with High Art and its stereotypes. Looking at the pioneers of Pop Art, Andy Warhol with his works “Campbell's Soup Cans” and “Untitled from Marilyn Monroe (Marian)” and Claes Oldenburg with his exaggerated fabrications of everyday objects. This will highlight how the clash of high art and low culture changed the world's view of what is classified as art. The first appearance of Pop Art was thought to have originated in the mid-1930s, but it was brought to the forefront of the art world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. "It was quite astonishing at the time. beginning – the first post-World War II figurative response to abstract art that was not essentially conservative (or anti-modernist) in spirit. This made people think about what was classified or defined as art. Dick Hebdige identifies; "...the disdainful critical response [to Pop] only reproduces without alteration the ideological distinctions between, on the one hand, the "serious", the "artistic", the "political", "being Great Art", "and the other, the “ephemeral”, the “commercial”, the “pleasant” which is considered low or popular culture. This notion can be...... middle of paper ......In other words, bringing high art to low culture. The Pop Art movement helped blur distinctions and stereotypes in art. Art is a paradigm judged on an individual level, like beauty; Art is judged by the eye of the beholder. Works Cited Collins, Jim, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 1995) Kostelanetz, Richard, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, 2nd ed., Schirmer Books, 2000. 'Mom and Pop Art' , The Simpsons, season 10, episode 19, DVD, directed by Steven Dean Moore 20th Century Fox: United States, 1999Scherman, Tony & Helman, Robin, “When pop shook up the art world,” American Heritage 52 , No. 1 (February/March 2001): 68-81.Wolf, Reva, “Homer Simpson as an Outsider Artist: How I Learned to Embrace Ambivalence,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 100-11.