Pop art's American dream is over – and a zombie culture has begun

The British Museum’s latest show brings together great pop and abstract expressionist images from the US. In the age of Trump, they seem like relics from a lost civilisation

The ruins of a lost civilisation are unveiled in the British Museum’s latest blockbuster. It fills the same huge gallery that recently housed colossal Egyptian statues and has previously displayed the wreckage of a Viking ship. The world it uncovers feels just as vanished and remote, yet the archaeological fragments on view are not amphorae, battle axes or Celtic brooches, but pieces of the American Dream.

Here is a US flag, faded to grey. Here is a diagram of an Apollo rocket, icon of the far-off age when President John F Kennedy sent Americans to the moon. Here is the Great American Nude – not to mention great American candy, gas stations and movie stars.

Related: The American art scene is dying of philistinism | Jonathan Jones

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