ambivalent relationship Does "expressed an ambivalent relationship with mass media" mean "they were not certain about having or not having a relationship with mass media" or "the had an ambiguous relationship with mass media"? Context: However, by the 1980s, a shift in the relationship between art and popular culture had also occurred whereby artists not only appropriated the subject matter and forms of mass culture but also began to mimic their modes of production. As I have already noted in Chapter 2, several key artists of the 1980s expressed an ambivalent relationship with mass media such as film and photography. As Lisa Phillips has observed, they ‘were media-literate, both addicted to, and aware of the media’s agenda of celebrity making, violence mongering, and sensationalism’, so that ‘many became increasingly cynical about the real possibility of maintaining an oppositional position’.