Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: To be suspended between high art's haughty isolation (in transcendence, in resistance, in critical negativity) and the universally pervasive mass cultural debris of corporate domination constitutes the founding dialectic within the modern artist's role.
Rosalind H. Williams: Democratic consumers sought to make consumption more equal and participatory. They wanted to rescue everyday consumption from banality by raising it to the level of a political and social statement.
John Cage: Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it . . . ).
Barbara Rose: I find his images offensive; I am annoyed to have to see in a gallery what I'm forced to look at in the supermarket. I go to the gallery to get away from the supermarket, not to repeat the experience.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Warhol thus groups together those photographic conventions that implement the collective scopic compulsions: looking at the Other (in endless envy at fame and fortune as much as in sadistic secrecy at catastrophe) and the perpetually vanishing Self (in futile tokens and substitutes).
Andy Warhol: The people that you know they want to do things and they never do things and they disappear so quickly, and then they're killed or something like that you know, nobody knows about them so I thought well maybe I'll do a painting about a person which you don't know about or something like that.
Yves Klein: All of these blue propositions, all alike in appearance, were recognized by the public as quite different from one another. The amateur passed from one to another, as he liked and penetrated, in a state of instantaneous contemplation, into the worlds of the blue. . . . The most sensational observation was that of the "buyers." Each selected out of the . . . pictures the one that was his, and each paid the asking price. The prices were all different of course.
Thierry De Duve: Warhol may be the one person who has understood, consciously or not I don't know, that to be a star is to be a blank screen.
