These pop art quotes will inspire you. Pop art, the art movement of the late 1950s and ’60s inspired by commercial and popular culture or art based on modern popular culture and the mass media, especially as a critical or ironic comment on traditional fine art values.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging pop art quotes, pop art sayings, and pop art proverbs.
Best Pop Art Quotes
- “Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesnt look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein
- “Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.” ~ Leonard Baskin
- “The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.” ~ Andy Warhol
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“Pop art is the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naive!” ~ Robert Indiana
- “Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won’t be American; it will be universal.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein , Pop art quotes paintings
- “Outside is the world; it’s there. Pop Art looks out into the world.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein
- “Pop art is for everyone.” ~ Andy Warhol
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“Pop Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion.” ~ Grace Hartigan
- “Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “Don’t worry about mistakes. Making things out of mistakes, that’s creativity.” ~ Peter Max , Pop art quotes creativity
- “We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular – popular culture.” ~ Jeffrey Deitch
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“Pop art is about liking things.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “People should fall in love with their eyes closed.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “Reality itself is steadily becoming more colored. Think of what factories were like, especially in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century, when industrialization was just beginning: gray, brown and smoky. Color didn’t exist. Today, instead, most everything is colored. The pipe running from the basement to the 12th floor is green because it carries steam. The one carrying electricity is red, and that with water is purple. Also, plastic colors have filled our homes, even revolutionized our taste. Pop art grew out of that and was possible because of this change in taste.” ~ Michelangelo Antonioni
- “I am a pop artist, so my medium is public opinion and the world is my canvas.” ~ Kanye West
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“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.” ~ Don DeLillo
- “Only thanks to Pop Art, my painting has become understandable.” ~ Domenico Gnoli
- “I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts” ~ Andy Warhol
- “There’s something retro about the pop culture references in the paintings, so I’d imagine it’s not as much a pop culture reference as a pop art reference.” ~ Joe Bradley
- “By the late ’50s, something was happening in England, and it got to be quite exciting. The music world then started to explode with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was an incredible time with this mixture of independence in art, fashion, and the explosion of the pop sensibility. London was certainly at the center of it all for a few years. And as far as art is concerned, I think that sensibility of what was later called Pop art started in England even before America. And so I was lucky to be there.” ~ Tony Shafrazi
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“When you stop wanting something, you get it.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.” ~ Gerhard Richter
- “I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I’m referencing American ’60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.” ~ Christian Marclay
- “I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it’s as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium. They’re printing the comics so small that most strips are just talking heads, and if you look back at the glory days of comic strips, you can see that they were showcases for some of the best pop art ever to come out.” ~ Matt Groening
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“I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.” ~ Robert Indiana
- “No matter what genre of music you play when you rack up a couple years of experience, you have your own point of view no matter who it is that is coming in front of you whether it’s a pop artist or a country artist. Whoever.” ~ Harry Connick, Jr.
- “I’ve always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That’s what I’ve always done.” ~ Jeff Koons
- “After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.” ~ Jeffrey Deitch
- “I like adding little elements into the final mix. I’m more fond of the ’70s glam than ’80s. I have that style of vocals… there are a lot of pop artists who are using the glam vibe in their music. I’m part of that wave.” ~ Adam Lambert
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“Reality is what you can get away with.” ~ Robert Anton Wilson
- “The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.” ~ Gerhard Richter
- “Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.” ~ J. G. Ballard
- “Pop art is a way of liking things.” ~ Andy Warhol
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“The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting” ~ Andy Warhol
- “I started drawing comics, and at first I was very influenced by the whole pop art movement, you know, Batman was on TV and all that pop art stuff? But then my next influence was in 1966, or maybe it was ’65, I don’t know. Somebody showed me a copy of the “East Village Other”, which was an underground newspaper. And… it had comics in it! And they weren’t superhero comics.” ~ Trina Robbins
- “We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd… Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste…? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?” ~ Norman Mailer
- “I’m always on the look out for ‘the good image’. I’m like The Borg (you know, Star Trek) inasmuch as I assimilate everything – but I like to think I’m working in the Pop Art tradition.” ~ Horace Panter
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“I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.” ~ Jack Nicholson
- “I’ve worked with jazz artists, country artists, classical artists, pop artists. I never wanted there to be categories, because when I was a kid there weren’t.” ~ Brian McKnight
- “Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.” ~ Claes Oldenburg
- “I think people always have – not just journalists who help their careers, I think all people struggle with this idea that a female pop artist can write all her songs. Even I do it sometimes, you see a really good female pop artist and you’re like, ‘I wonder if she writes her songs.’ That’s never really my first initial reaction to a male popstar.” ~ Ellie Rowsell
- “I think for the open-minded, I’m a lot like Luciano Pavarotti… But I don’t know the technique. I’m learning. I think Pavarotti was a citizen of the world. He was very eclectic. He sang with Sting and with a lot of other pop artists, and this open-mindedness, for me, is very important.” ~ Amaury Vassili
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“In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.” ~ Colin MacInnes
- “I don’t mean this, but I’m going to say it anyway. I don’t really think of pop art and serious art as being that far apart.” ~ Twyla Tharp
- “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?” ~ William S. Burroughs
- “It is the transcendent (or ‘abstract’ or ‘self-contained’) nature of music that the new so called concretism–Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete–opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.” ~ Igor Stravinsky
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“Death means a lot of money, honey. Death can really make you look like a star.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “I never read, I just look at pictures.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “Business Art is the step that comes after Art.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.” ~ Andy Warhol
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“I wonder if it’s possible to have a love affair that lasts forever.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art” ~ Andy Warhol
- “When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “I think the term ‘conceptual art’ is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.” ~ John Baldessari
- “I’m maybe not so anxious to be a successful pop artist. Of course I want people to like my music, but I know what the price of success can be, too. Basically, I’m happy as long as I can keep my freedom, so I’m so happy with the way things are at the moment. I get to be hands-on with details in every aspect of what I’m doing, but I also get to perform for a big audience.” ~ Robyn
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“I think everybody should like everybody.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “In the beginning, the energy involved to create came from my reaction to the work of other artists. The force behind this was aggression. The art that I saw was great, but I had to reject it, because I could not continue in the same direction. So I had to do something entirely different. It had to be so different, so extreme, that those who loved pop art, for instance, hated me. And this was my strength.” ~ Georg Baselitz
- “Much to my chagrin, I think that cinema has gone the wrong way in America because in many ways, I pioneered the use of video which eventually became digital video. Everyone can do it; it’s Pop Art time: “Everything is art, why should you take it so seriously, after all it’s kind of like a clambake.” I don’t buy that.” ~ Rob Nilsson
- “There’s a definite connection in terms of objects at hand – dealing with objects or material at hand. Pop art was very much enamored with popular imagery, and popular imagery was of course available and at hand. And land art was also using what was at hand.” ~ Virginia Dwan
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“I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.” ~ Robert Indiana
- “When I hear the same formula being used over and over, I get bored. Just as huge pop artists have taken inspiration from things that are happening at the moment, I do the same with my music.” ~ Katy B
- “I’m definitely a pop artist at heart.” ~ Sheena Easton
- “I did an art show for Donald Trump at his house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a bunch of pop art and stuff like that, so I wasn’t doing any graffiti at that time, so I’d say from about 2000 to 2006, I wasn’t doing any graffiti.” ~ Alec Monopoly
- “I remember Steve Kaufman as the artist on Saturday Night Live doing the Pop Art portraits for the show.” ~ Joe Piscopo
