Why did Pop art artists use subjects such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers?

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Five Andy Warhol paintings of Campbell's soup cans, each labeled with a different soup variety, displayed in a row on a white wall at Museumsquartier in Vienna. — Pop art *Campbell's Soup Cans*, polymer paint on canvas by Andy Warhol, 1962; a selection of five on display in the Museumsquartier, Vienna.

Pop art artists utilized subjects like comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers as a diverse response to the commodity-driven values of the postwar era. By incorporating these commonplace objects, artists aimed to bridge the gap between art and everyday life, rejecting the elitism of traditional "high art" and the intense subjectivity of Abstract Expressionism.1

The use of such imagery served several purposes:

Objectivity and Democracy: By presenting mass-produced iconography emphatically and objectively, artists sought to create a form of art that was easily comprehensible and accessible to both connoisseurs and the general public.1
Cultural Reflection: These subjects reflected the consumer abundance of the era, while simultaneously commenting on the routinization of modern life and the techniques of brand marketing and mass production.1
Iconoclasm: The movement was inherently iconoclastic, using the precise commercial techniques of the media to challenge the pretensions of the contemporary avant-garde.1

While some artists used these images to celebrate consumer culture, others employed them to register the darker side of society, using repetition or juxtaposition to highlight the desensitizing effects of an image-saturated world.1