Art pop is a loosely defined style of pop music that emerged in the mid-1960s, influenced by art theories as well as ideas from other art mediums, such as fashion, fine art, cinema, contemporary art and avant-garde literature. The genre draws on pop art's integration of high and low culture, and emphasizes signs, style, and gesture over personal expression. Art pop musicians may deviate from traditional pop audiences and rock music conventions, instead exploring postmodern approaches and ideas such as pop's status as commercial art, notions of artifice and the self, and questions of historical authenticity.

During the mid-1960s, British and American pop musicians such as Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and the Beatles began incorporating the ideas of the pop art movement into their recordings. English art pop musicians drew from their art school studies, while in America the style drew on the influence of pop artist Andy Warhol and the affiliated band the Velvet Underground. The style would experience its "golden age" in the 1970s among glam rock artists such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, who embraced theatricality and throwaway pop culture.

Art pop's tradition continued in the late 1970s and 1980s through styles such as post-punk and synthpop as well as the British New Romantic scene, developing further with artists who rejected conventional rock instrumentation and structure in favor of dance styles and the synthesizer. The 2010s saw new art pop trends develop, such as hip hop artists drawing on visual art and vaporwave artists exploring the sensibilities of contemporary capitalism and the Internet.

Art pop draws on postmodernism's breakdown of the high/low cultural boundary and explores concepts of artifice and commerce. The style emphasizes the manipulation of signs over personal expression, drawing on an aesthetic of the everyday and the disposable, in distinction to the Romantic and autonomous tradition embodied by art rock or progressive rock. Sociomusicologist Simon Frith has distinguished the appropriation of art into pop music as having a particular concern with style, gesture, and the ironic use of historical eras and genres. Central to particular purveyors of the style were notions of the self as a work of construction and artifice, as well as a preoccupation with the invention of terms, imagery, process, and affect. The Independent's Nick Coleman wrote: "Art-pop is partly about attitude and style; but it's essentially about art. It is, if you like, a way of making pure formalism socially acceptable in a pop context."

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote that the development of art pop evolved out of the triangulation of pop, art, and fashion. Frith states that it was "more or less" directly inspired by Pop art. According to critic Stephen Holden, art pop often refers to any pop style which deliberately aspires to the formal values of classical music and poetry, though these works are often marketed by commercial interests rather than respected cultural institutions. Writers for The Independent and the Financial Times have noted the attempts of art pop music to distance its audiences from the public at large. Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice in 1987 that art-pop results "when a fascination with craft spirals up and in until it turns into an aestheticist obsession."

What seems clearer in retrospect [...] is a distinction between the first wave of art school musicians, the London provincial r & b players who simply picked up the bohemian attitude and carried it with them into progressive rock, and a second generation, who applied art theories to pop music making

The boundaries between art and pop music became increasingly blurred throughout the second half of the 20th century. In the 1960s, pop musicians such as John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Pete Townshend, Brian Eno, and Bryan Ferry began to take inspiration from their previous art school studies. Frith states that in Britain, art school represented "a traditional escape route for the bright working class kids, and a breeding ground for young bands like the Beatles and beyond". In North America, art pop was influenced by Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation, and became more literary through folk music's singer-songwriter movement. Before progressive/art rock became the most commercially successful British sound of the early 1970s, the 1960s psychedelic movement brought together art and commercialism, broaching the question of what it meant to be an "artist" in a mass medium. Progressive musicians thought that artistic status depended on personal autonomy, and so the strategy of "progressive" rock groups was to present themselves as performers and composers "above" normal pop practice.

Another chief influence on the development of art pop was the Pop art movement. The term "pop art", first coined to describe the aesthetic value of mass-produced goods, was directly applicable to the contemporary phenomenon of rock and roll (including Elvis Presley, an early Pop art icon). According to Frith: "[Pop art] turned out to signal the end of Romanticism, to be an art without artists. Progressive rock was the bohemians' last bet [...] In this context the key Pop art theorist was not [Richard] Hamilton or any of the other British artists who, for all their interest in the mass market, remained its academic admirers only, but Andy Warhol. For Warhol the significant issue wasn't the relative merits of 'high' and 'low' art but the relationship between all art and 'commerce'." Warhol's Factory house band the Velvet Underground was an American group who emulated Warhol's art/pop synthesis, echoing his emphasis on simplicity, and pioneering a modernist avant-garde approach to art rock that ignored the conventional hierarchies of artistic representation.