The term popular culture, often shortened to pop culture, crystallized around the middle of the twentieth century in recognition of the definitive emergence in European and especially North American society of mass-produced and -consumed cultural goods (including novels, recorded music, radio programs, motion pictures, and advertisements). Popular culture products are usually created by people who do not classify themselves as artists, and they are accepted by people who do not think of themselves as exercising aesthetic judgments. Other, more pejorative terms that have been used to refer to this phenomenon are mass culture (José Ortega y Gasset and others) and the culture industry (Theodor W. Adorno). The term was fashioned after the pop art ("popular art") movement that emerged in the late 1950s—a movement that saw artists appropriate images and commodities from consumerist culture as their subject matter. One of the most famous pop artists...