From its early dismissal by established critics to its rapid embrace by the public-at-large, Pop art represented a dramatic turning point in the development of postwar art. For that reason, it has whetted scholarly interest and has been the focus of numerous art-historical studies over the years. In her eminently readable and engaging book Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture, Sara Doris dives into the debates that greeted Pop upon its emergence in the late 1950s and that have continued to the present day. Doris aims to provide a deeper and more nuanced reading of Pop art by “situating it within the social and cultural debates within which it participated” (16). Although other publications on Pop also contextualize the movement aesthetically, socially, culturally, and, to some extent, politically, Doris’s well-defined focus on specific aspects of culture—such as an expanding middle class and its influence on taste, an economy of planned obsolescence, the development of camp, and the new teen sensibility—results in a revealing study. In large part because of social upheaval during the postwar years, especially the sixties and early seventies, culture, according to Doris, served as a “site for the expression of anxieties about the instability of...