The challenge to art of mass produced objects and techniques of reproduction of imagery have intensified questions of the relations between art and popular culture. Arguably, art has only become unpopular as a reaction to these dynamics and developments, once popular culture assumed a particular significance as apparently defining of cultures of democracies. Debates in art about the distance from the popular, or closeness to it, will be reviewed in these contexts, in a critical exploration of the meanings of imagery and the purposes of art.