Jeffrey Deitch Quotes

For me, Warhol made so much sense.

I really like the pop culture materials of everyday life, but used in some way that elevates them to something you notice and care about.

In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.

Pop art is a way of liking things.

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.

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.

I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world.

For me as an artist, pop culture has so much power and influences society on a regular basis - I see it in the kids; I see it in everyone that I encounter. Everyone is influenced by pop culture whether we want to be or not.

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

The whole Disney thing is really interesting, in a way, how that's so permeated life and the world and the planet.

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S.

I have so much to thank reality TV for.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

When I was making my debut as an artist, I felt that it was very important that I try to combine the background of my own culture, my people, and the country into the contemporary art world. So that's how I came up with the term 'superflat.'

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

Contemporary art will never achieve the audience of football, pop music, or television, so I think we should stop comparing its possible area of influence to that of big mass-media events.

There are always pluses and minus to commercialization. It broadcasts something to the masses. So that's the plus. The minus is it may lose some of its meaning if you dilute it.

Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface, but it's not. It's the language we all speak, and it's the connection point between people all over the world.

I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.

Reality TV is flat with the anti-cultural imperatives of business: cheap to make, it does ideological work even when it is not giving guru status to dull business people. It fits in with capitalism's anti-mythic myth: the idea that we have liberated ourselves from the dangerous illusions allegedly propagated by art and politics.