Pepsi-Cola Sign, 1961

​On December 1, 1961, Claes
Oldenburg’sThe Storeopened for
business in New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood. During a two-month run,
Oldenburg used the back half of a rented storefront space to create the objects
that he put on sale in the front half, thereby short-circuiting the studio and the
art gallery. Hung on the walls, arrayed in vitrines, and mounted on display stands,
Oldenburg’s plaster objects mimicked the goods sold in local secondhand and discount
stores—primarily clothing and foodstuffs, but also advertising paraphernalia,
as inPepsi-Cola Sign. According to
Oldenburg,The Storewas his response
to the possibility that “art is doomed to be bourgeois,” or materialistic. The
intensified, overwrought qualities ofPepsi-Cola
Sign—its lumpy shape, garish hues, feverish drips of paint, and distorted
scale—manifest the viselike grip that consumer culture has on the distribution
and consumption of art under capitalism.