The US Studies Centre partnered with the Power Institute and Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney to present a lecture by international guest speaker Thomas Crow. In The Death and Life of Pop Art in the 1960s Counter-Culture Crow discussed the legacy of pop and its influence in other areas of culture.
In the 1960s pop enlarged the capacity of fine art to channel deep but inchoate feelings in whole populations normally put off by the exclusivity of museums and galleries. But by the end of the decade, pop seemed rapidly to fade, enduring as a set of fine individual careers but no longer a vital tendency still attracting young adherents. Or so it might have seemed. The success of pop in crystallising the ambient imagery of daily life challenged young designers, musicians, and filmmakers to apply the same acuity to their own work and in the process equipping themselves to address an enlarged, better-educated, and more self-aware audience among the young. No reckoning with pop is complete if it fails to include designers on the order of Milton Glaser, Rick Griffin, and Roman Cieslewicz, musicians like the Byrds, the Who, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles, or directors like Jean-Luc Godard and John Schlesinger. The international counter-culture kept pop current but in the process surpassed, dispersed, and ultimately obscured the sources.
