1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol Quotes
page 3

Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych , the experimental film Chelsea Girls , and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable .

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame." In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He authored numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. After gallbladder surgery, Warhol died of cardiac arrhythmia in February 1987 at the age of 58.

Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh, which holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$105 million for a 1963 canvas titled Silver Car Crash ; his works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Wikipedia  

✵ 6. August 1928 – 22. February 1987
Andy Warhol photo
Andy Warhol: 133   quotes 15   likes

Andy Warhol Quotes

“The farther West we drove [to California, Fall of 1963, with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead for an opening of Warhol's 'Liz & Elvis paintings' at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles], the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere – that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it – to us, it was the new Art. Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again. The moment you label something, you take a step – I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled. We were seeing the future and we knew it for sure.... the mystery was gone, but the amazement was just starting.”

Andy Warhol

quote in 1963
Quote in Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz; as quoted in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467
1963 - 1967

People , Art , Angels , Way

“In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like "charming" and "clever" and "pretty" are all put-downs; all the lighter things in life, which are the most important things, are put down.”

Andy Warhol

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 4: Beauty

Life , People , Thinking

“If an artist can't do anymore, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year of two from now [1963]. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen; that's going to be the whole new scene.”

Andy Warhol

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Feeling , Thinking , Change , Painting

“Therefore, everything seen – every object, that is, plus the process of looking at it – is a Duchamp. Turn it over and it is.”

Andy Warhol

Quote by John Cage that Banes relates to Warhol's work in Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Sally Banes, Duke University Press, 1993; p. 124
1963 - 1967

“I guess it was the big plane crash picture [why Warhol started his 'Death'-series], the front page of a newspaper: '129 DIED'. I was also painting the Marilyns [the Marylin Monroe portraits, Warhol started after her tragic death in 1962] I realized that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and very time that you turned on the radio they said something like '4 millions are going to die'. That started it. But when you see I gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect.”

Andy Warhol

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Death , Time , Holiday , Christmas

“A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the 'Factory' was hanging around, that I was some kind of big attraction that everyone came to see, but that's absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open. People weren't particularly interested in seeing me; they were interested in seeing each other. They came to see who came.”

Andy Warhol

1975 - 1987
Source: POPism (1980); as quoted in Warhol in his own words – Untitled Statements ( 1963 – 1987), selected by Neil Printz, in Andy Warhol, retrospective, Art and Bullfinch Press / Little Brown, 1989, pp. 457 – 467

People

“The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”

Andy Warhol

'What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters', Part 1, G. R. Swenson, in Art News 62, November 1963
1963 - 1967

Way , Feeling , Painting

“In my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that's not the age we're living in.”

Andy Warhol

undated quotes
Source: Machine in the Studio, Caroline A. Jones, University of Chicago Press, 1996 pp. 197-198

Age , Art , Painting

“Sex is nostalgia for sex.”

Andy Warhol

Quote from: http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/47184/index3.html
undated quotes

Sex , Nostalgia

“In fifteen minutes, everyone will be famous.”

Andy Warhol

1968 - 1974

“In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.”

Andy Warhol

1968 - 1974
This quotation has produced a common cliché about fame in pop-culture which is called "15 minutes of fame"; it has often been paraphrased or misquoted in various ways
Source: Catalogue of an exhibition of his art in Stockholm, Sweden (1968)

Future , World

“When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong. And sizing is a form of thinking and coloring is too. My instinct about painting says, 'If you don’t think about it, it's right.'”

Andy Warhol

As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets. Some people, they paint abstract, so they sit there thinking about it because their thinking makes them feel they're doing something. But my thinking never makes me feel I'm doing anything.
Source: 1970s, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), p. 149

Thinking , Painting , Color