Popular art styles contain distinctive elements that can relate to various art influences. Pop art is an art style that was a direct challenge to abstract expressionism. The new style tries to gain meaning from an array of venues such as commercial paint, paper, fabrics and silkscreen painting.

Popular modern art also drew influences from the comic style graphic magazine drawings. Popular abstract art focuses on structures built from various overlapped objects, materials and containing a center piece that draw attention towards the whole structure. The abstract in pop art comes from the real – the real objects and styles overlapping and blending in with each other.

This brings the message that art can be made out of anything and anything can be turned into a “popular nothing”. Unlike the popular French art movement – the Dadaism whose usage of common mundane objects was not to create a new popular expression, but to subvert and collapse the expression of elite art, the popular type of art decided to reflect the current society, by including household items like a can of tomato juice or household names like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

Popular contemporary art is called Neo pop art and it started around the beginning of the 90s when new artists used pop art styles and applied them in a more dramatic and controversial ways. From creating large installations or neo pop animals sculpted in organic materials like flowers, bushes or many more. The most popular works of art in the neo pop style are Jeff Koons’ inflatable plastic rabbits and dogs, as well as the famous giant rats by Katharina Fritsch.