The Birth and Death of The American Dream

The Irish Times, “The Wire, 10 years on: ‘We showed the American dream was dead’”, March 2018:

“...“They were such a unique pair to be writing this show,” says John Doman (deputy commissioner William Rawls). “Their view was from the inside out, not from the outside in. They knew the stories and the characters first-hand. I think The Wire really tore the cover off an American city and showed that, for so many people, the American dream was dead...”

  
Stephen Bayley, ‘How art chronicled the birth – and death – of the American dream’, The Spectator, UK, March 2017:

“....Wesselmann’s deliciously objectified and cartoonishly ridiculous nipples, as luscious as ice cream, and Estes’s mesmerising hyper-realist diners, so superior to their architectural original, are, in the end, more moving than campaigns about Aids, minority rights and feminism. Artists of the American dream were at their best worshipping trash, ironising the military-industrial complex, enjoying cars, teasing celebrities and mocking death: pleasure, sex and beauty being better inspirations than anguish or blame. Consumerism bests activism.

Can the dream be salvaged in a dismayed, deindustrialised, ethnonationalist America?...”

'Preliminary Painting for Tit and Telephone', 1968

Artist: Tom Wesselmann

“The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art. I think I have succeeded, but there is still a lot further to go.”