Barthes was drawn to the idea that the aim of Pop Art was to rid the work of any meaning and, as such, it represented, in his words, a 'revolutionary force which contests art'. Although he only rarely focused his critical attentions on art, Barthes did reserve praise for Pop Art, and the work of Cy Twombly because, in his view, both existed for-and-of themselves.It was a reproach Barthes would have worn with pride given that his goal was to dismantle what he saw as the staid and unadventurous bourgeois conventions of 'official' literary criticism. Barthes's so-called 'new criticism' rankled with many of France's top literary scholars who discounted his writing as self-absorbed, deliberately opaque, and (therefore) lacking academic credibility.Emerging in the mid-1970s, they were a loose affiliation, including the likes of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, and John Baldessari, who, having taken their lead from Pop Art and Conceptual Art, reworked (or even just copied) existing imagery as a way of asking the viewer to call into question the two great cornerstones of modernist ideology: authenticity and artistic genius. 'The Death of the Author' provided impetus for many post-modernists, including Jeff Koons, and a group of New York based artists who became known as The Pictures Generation.

By this means he claimed to have exposed the hidden ideological structures that were necessary to maintain the interests of the ruling (bourgeois) classes.

In it he brought together a disparate collection of examples from mass culture and used semiological analysis to deconstruct the chosen object/image/performance. Barthes made his name initially as a semiologist and was instrumental in the rise of French structuralism through the publication of his most famous single collection of essays, Mythologies (1957).It gave rise to the idea of many credible 'truths' (plural) over one 'truth' (singular) and ushered in a period of critical analysis called post-structuralism. Challenging the idea that what the author/artist said about their art was the definitive word on its meaning, he proposed rather that the individual viewer should be regarded as the author of the text and that it is she or he who brings their own - legitimate - meaning to the text (artwork). Barthes's single most significant essay was 'The Death of the Author' (1967).

Mythologies 1957