Warhol Quotes

“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

“You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.”
― Andy Warhol

“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”
― Andy Warhol

“In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“as if l was pitch black and everyone else, pastel”
― Kathy Acker

“I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art.”
― 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, A Retrospective

“Art is what you get away with”
― Andy Warhol

“I look for ambiguity because life is ambiguous!”
― Marko Stout

“Warhol himself was never anything but a kind of hologram. Famous people came to the Factory to hover around him without being able to get anything from him, but they tried to pass through him as you might with a filter or a camera lens, which is what he had in effect become. Valerie Solanas was even to try to shatter that lens by shooting at it, to pass through the hologram to establish that blood could still flow from it. So we can agree with Warhol: `You can't get more superficial than me and live'. And he nearly didn't come out of it alive.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“Let us not be deceived about the cool forms, forms indifferent to themselves, which this fetishism can assume in Warhol. Behind this machinic snobbery, what is really going on is a rise and rise of objects, images, signs and simulacra, as well as a rise and rise of values, the finest example of which is the art market itself. We are a long way from the alienation of price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the ecstasy of value, which explodes the notion of market and simultaneously destroys the art work as such. Warhol is naturally party to this extermination of the real by the image, and to such an overdoing of the image as to put an end to all aesthetic value.

Warhol reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. In this sense, we cannot say he is not a great artist: fortunately for him, he is not an artist at all. The point of his work is a challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“Have you ever noticed a certain type of man who always wants to go along with his wife to pick out her clothes? I've always thought that's because he wants to wear them himself.

Truman Capote on Warhol”
― Jean Stein, Edie: American Girl

“Jean told me that Madonna had been there to visit him the week before I came. Madonna, he said, had asked him to take her on a shopping spree. He asked me why I never asked him to do this and I answered that it never occurred to me to ask him for such a thing.

Then I said, "Will you take me on a shopping spree?"

And he said, "No, I'm completely broke from Madonna's shopping spree.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“In the future? People will realize the opposite of what Andy Warhol – yes, a Pole! – predicted. Instead of everyone getting fifteen minutes of fame, everyone will get fifteen minutes of privacy. Satellites, cameras, the internet, these are tracking us every second. The next generation of young people will crave solitude. The non-stop gaze of mass media ogling us, that’s the new monster.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Eventually, with new Entertainment-dedicated technologies already on the horizon, the Warhol vision would come about, and everyone would have a show of their own. Eventually the old world would be cut quite loose. Performance Mirrors face to face, the shows would reflect one another until there was 'nothing but interviews, appearances, and acts. In full development, the whole industrial and technical base of contemporary society would be committed to support this new pyramid culture'.”
― Colin Bennett, The entertainment bomb

“Warhol never tires himself. The agnostic isn't going to tire himself out working for the glory of God, or to prove his existence. Warhol isn't going to tire himself out proving the existence of art. Because, fundamentally, there is no need. We no more need the pathos of art than we need the pathos of suffering or the pathos of desire. A Stoic trait, this. What is good about Warhol is that he is Stoical, agnostic, puritanical and heretical all at the same time. Having all the qualities, he generously credits all around him with them. The world is there, and it's excellent. People are there, and they're OK. They have no need to believe in what they are doing, they're perfect. He is the best, but everyone's a genius. Never before has the privilege of the creator been quashed in such a way, by a kind of maximalist irony. And all without contempt or demagogy: there is in him a kind of airy innocence, a gracious form of the abolition of privileges. There is in him something of the Cathars and the theory of the Perfect.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“This is why Warhol is not part of the history of art. He is, quite simply, part of the world. He does not represent it; he is a fragment of it: a fragment in the pure state. This is why, seen from the viewpoint of art, he can be disappointing. Seen as a refraction of our world, he is perfectly self-evident. Like the world itself: looked at from the angle of meaning, the world is thoroughly disappointing. From the angle of appearance and detail, it is perfectly selfevident. And so is the Warhol machine, that extraordinary machine for filtering the world in its material self-evidence.

No one can claim to describe that machine. That would imply a literal complicity, a machinic complicity, with Warhol. Now, not everyone has the good fortune to be a machine.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“Cuando Warhol vino a Madrid, yo estaba invitado a todas las fiestas que se organizaron en su honor. Era el año 1983 y vino para promocionar su exposición de pistolas, crucifijos y cuchillos. Nos presentaron una y otra vez en cada una de las fiestas y no me dirigió una sola palabra, su modo de reaccionar era hacerte alguna foto con una camarita que siempre llevaba en la mano. Los que me presentaban decían siempre lo mismo: este (por mí) es el Warhol español. La quinta vez que se lo dijeron me preguntó por qué me llamaban el Warhol español, y yo, absolutamente avergonzado, le dije: «Supongo que porque saco en mis películas a travestis y transexuales». Embarazoso encuentro.”
― Pedro Almodóvar, El último sueño

“We always went to sleep with a mirror covered with coke right at our heads on this headboard shelf. There was white powder ground into it all over the place.

Sometimes he would stay out for thress days at a time on coke and in clubs with other women. He would not talk to me but he wanted me there. He had different people over at night. Sometimes it was fun for me. We would sit around the living-room coffee table and do coke for hours.

The smell of his sweat came out of my pores.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“Her mother kissed her forehead at the station, "Be careful, Suzy," she said. "Everybody is hungry." Her brothers and sisters gave her a card. It says, "Suzy Q, we love you." Her father gave her twenty dollars. "Call us," he said.

Suzanne sits still, so skinny, knowing the size of her bones. Knowing how to cover bruises with makeup, Knowing how to disappear. She thinks about Sammy, who came and left so quickly, who sucked the salt out of her fingers. She remembers the day Sammy learned to say, "Ouch." And that was all she would say forever after, "Ouch, ouch, ouch,," like a little song.

Suzanne came home from school one day and Sammy wasn't there anymore. "You know how these kids are, Suzy," Suzanne's mother said. " They just kind of come and go. She was sweet, though.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“Jean-Michel says it frightens him that one day he might accidentally eat pork....

His mother taught him this. Jean said that the pig meat can get right into your heart and make it grow. He said many scientists knew this. He said that they had X-rayed people who eat port and that they have more arteries and veins and that the heart became like a big complicated knot.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“While Suzanne is in Canada, the boy who is covering her waitressing shifts at Binibon is killed by Jack Henry Abbott, the man Norman Mailer wrote about in The Belly of the Beast. This man has been living in the halfway houses near the Bowery.

Jean-Michel sees the white, larvae-white paint, the outline of the body drawn by police on the sidewalk.

It takes twenty minutes and forty-two seconds for Jean-Mich to run home and call Suzanne in Canada. "Come home," he cries. "It could have been you.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“He refuses to sell his paintings and writes" NOT FOR SALE" on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a "graffiti artist" and "primitive." "They don't invent a childhood for white artists," he says.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story

“His paintings were inspired by the jazz musicians and he felt akin to them. A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn't even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitchens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the white art world: he had entered through the back door.”
― Jennifer Clement, Widow Basquiat: A Love Story