Warhol Art Quotes & Sayings

The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off.
But that will not liberate Black people. — Amiri Baraka

You know it's ART, when the check clears. — Andy Warhol

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned. — Camille Paglia

Business Art is the step that comes after Art. — Andy Warhol

There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought. — Al Jourgensen

Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot. — Barbara Kruger

I think Chelsea Girls is a complete masterpiece and I think Andy's [Warhol] films are equally as good as the art. I think one day they will be considered equal. They aren't yet. They will be. — John Waters

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice. — Barbara Kruger

Years later, I figured out why he (Ivan Karp) was such a successful art dealer-this may sound strange, but I believe it was because art was his second love. He seemed to love literature more, and he put the serious side of his nature into that ... Some people are even better at their second love than their first, maybe because when they care too much, it freezes them, but knowing there's something they'd rather be doing gives them a certain freedom. — Andy Warhol

You meet rich people and you hang around with them, and one night they've had a few drinks and they say 'I'll buy it!' Then they tell their friends, 'You must have this person's work, darling,' and that's all you need. That's all it takes. Get it? — Andy Warhol

If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is every completely right for any part, because part in a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something. — Andy Warhol

'No Hands' art goes straight back to Warhol. He was the first to use elves. — Tom Wolfe

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job. — Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol's art wasn't that interesting to me. He was more interesting to me as a person. He was art himself. I don't even think he was really into art, per se. He may have liked to do it, but I think he was more into people being into him. — ASAP Ferg

The mystery was gone but the amazement was just starting. — Andy Warhol

When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away. — Robbie Robertson

I can never get over when you're on the beach how beautiful the sand looks and the water washes it away and straightens it up and the trees and the grass all look great. I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own. — Andy Warhol

Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star. — Andy Warhol

Interviewer: "Andy do you feel that the public has insulted your art?"
Andy Warhol: "Uh no."
I: "Why not?"
AW: "Uh well I hadn't thought about it."
I: "It doesn't bother you at all then?"
AW: "Uh no."
I: "Well do you think that they have shown a lack of appreciation for what pop art means?"
AW: "Uh no."
I: "Andy do you think that pop art has sort of reached the point where it's becoming repetitious now?"
AW: "Uh yes."
I: "Do you think it should break away from being pop art?"
AW: "Uh no."
I: "Are you just going to carry on?"
AW: "Uh yes. — Andy Warhol

I just do art because I'm ugly and there's nothing else for me to do. — Andy Warhol

I think it would be great to make a $2 million or $3 million art movie where nobody would really have to go to it. I thought that would be a good project to work on ... do something really artistic. — Andy Warhol

Pop art is a way of liking things. — Andy Warhol

I've collected Andy Warhol art for years now I have two portraits of myself done by Steve Kaufman. — David Caruso

I loved working when I worked at commercial art and they told you what to do and how to do it and all you had to do was correct it and they'd say yes or no. The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own. — Andy Warhol

I'm for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction. — Andy Warhol

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol's Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made. — Uta Barth

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art — Andy Warhol

Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you? — Andy Warhol

They say rock is dead. Andy [Warhol] said art is dead. God is dead according to Nietzsche. If everything's dead what's alive? Only technology. We're in the era of technology. — Sean Lennon

Land really is the best art. — Andy Warhol

Pop art is for everyone. — Andy Warhol

I think an artist is anybody who does something well, like if you cook well. — Andy Warhol

Most people in America think Art is a man's name. — Andy Warhol

In order to become a master, you need to emulate. If you're going to be as big as Warhol has become in art, then you have to have younger generations who are exploring your work and trying to understand it like a language. — Mike Bidlo

Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art. — Andy Warhol

I was a product of Andy Warhol's Factory. All I did was sit there and observe these incredibly talented and creative people who were continually making art, and it was impossible not to be affected by that. — Lou Reed

Art is what you can get away with. — Andy Warhol

I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form. — Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. — Andy Warhol

Everything will be art and nothing will be art, because everything, as I believe, already is. — Andy Warhol

Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways of painting. Like Warhol, he changed the game of art. — Jenny Saville

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine. — Andy Warhol

Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different — Alexander McCall Smith

Pop art is about liking things. — Andy Warhol

Take an exhibit, in the days when we saw the Pop art - Andy Warhol and all that - tomato soup cans, etc., and coming home, you saw everything like A. Warhol. — Corita Kent

Don't think about making art ... — Andy Warhol

I then discovered the Pop Art of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Peter Max. I was inspired that these fun and colourful images could be presented seriously on canvas. — Joe Average

I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000 ... ' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by. — Jean Pigozzi

When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean. — James Franco

If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money. — Robert Crumb

Every time I work with Dr. Luke I learn something new. He's kind of like the Andy Warhol of pop music, where he mass produces his art but it always still has heart and always still has an emotional thread to it. I think he's really a genius and I'm so lucky to have gotten to work with him. — Bonnie McKee

Fashion is more art than art is — Andy Warhol

As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything. — Darren Criss

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were. — Bob Colacello

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60. — Gore Vidal

Money is completely boring to me. It means nothing, except it feeds my art. Every penny I make goes back into the Haus of GaGa. My Haus of GaGa is something like Andy Warhol's Factory. — Lady Gaga

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art. — Andy Warhol

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. — Jean Baudrillard

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. — Andy Warhol

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want. — Andy Warhol

Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world. — Dan Graham

Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. — Andy Warhol

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. — Andy Warhol

25 years ago, when I started in New York, I had the pleasure to cook for Andy Warhol. At the time, I could have traded art for food - I should have done so, because I could get his work for nothing! — Daniel Boulud

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. — Kim Gordon

Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody.
Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things. — Andy Warhol

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see ... So the fantasy corners of America ... you've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you've custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. — Andy Warhol

When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol. — Wolfgang Tillmans

If you're not trying to be real, you don't have to get it right. That's art. — Andy Warhol

Good business is the best art of all. — Andy Warhol