Pete Townshend Quotes

Warhol was the ultimate voyeur, constantly observing people through the lens. He watched and listened, but did not participate. Behind the camera, Warhol was in control.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

That is what [Andy] Warhol portraits do: They elevate the subject into an icon of the pop culture he was documenting.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

For me, Warhol made so much sense.

Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

I believe that Ryan Murphy is a genius. His instincts remind me of Andy Warhol. I recently went to the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, and you can see a lot of echoes of Andy in Ryan's work. Like Andy, Ryan's finger is so on the pulse of culture that he's ahead of culture. Their aesthetic and their vision of the world are very similar.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

I find pop art really offensive because it's taking a piece of popular culture and putting it somewhere where people can't see it.

Warhol was proof that you can be revolutionary without being militant.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

He [Andy Warhol] engaged people and I think all of that is what helped keep him keyed in to the times beyond all of the celebrity stuff that was going on around him. He was much more like a fan than a celebrity himself.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.