I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.
I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.
Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.
