Martin Filler Quotes

When I think of the 1980s, the only color that comes to mind is a brown, yellowish color. I guess it's coming from my life experience, and it's melancholia and sadness and a bit of joy.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

People want to make a distinction between what's commercial and what's art.

I would actually like to play Bobby Brown. To me, he was just the King of R&B at one point.

I'm interested in visual vocabulary, like Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture.

I love dressing up. As kids, my friends and I would dress up as the Spice Girls - Posh Spice was my favourite because I had short brown hair like her.

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images?

I think what makes his story unique from others is there is not really one piece of American pop music you hear today that does not have some James Brown in it.

I'm a pop artist, and that's what I'll always be. I don't want to be a 'credible artist.'

I've always had pop-star crushes. I had a huge crush on Ian Brown.

Black culture - we dance and sing. We're entertainers. James Brown said it best: the things we are make people want to be like us.

I was inspired by James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince.

Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

Sometimes I love the marriage of art and commerce; I love Donna Summer; I like the Rolling Stones.

One night in the early sixties I passed something on the Long Island Expressway just before the Queens tunnel that I must have seen for years. The billboard advertising cigars, Dutch Masters. I realized it was sort of perfect. It's weird isn't it? You're looking at Rembrandt - in neon! It was too much, it was irresistible.

Murphy Brown is doing better than I am. At least she knows she still has a job next year.

We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things – but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.

I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me.

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

A lot of people wanted to try to make me the white Nicki Minaj. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I love ‘hood’ music, but my talent is as a singer.