I got the idea of doing really simple minded pictures that would look inept and kind of stupid and the colour would look as if it wasn't art.
I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
I think I am anti-experimental and anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting away from the tyranny of the rectangle, anti-movement and light, anti-mystery, anti-paint quality, anti-Zen and anti all of those brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everyone understands so thoroughly.
I want my images to be as critical, as threatening and as insistent as possible.
I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.
It's not saying that commercial art is terrible or 'look what we've come to' — that may be a sociological fact but it's not what this art is about.
My work doesn't look like a painting ... it looks like the thing itself.
My work is about our American definition of images,and visual communication.
One would hardly look at my work and think it wasn't satirical, I think, or that it makes no social comment. I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any.
Pop Art is actually industrial painting, it is what the whole world will soon become.
The obvious things influenced by Cezanne statement about cubes, cones and cylinders all got made into art objects ... and nonsense ... sometimes it was beautiful nonsense.
We like to think of industrialization as being despicable. I don't really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter. There are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art. We're using those things — but we're not really advocating stupidity, international teenagerism, and terrorism.
What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.
I think Picasso would have thrown up if he'd seen my versions. Maybe not, though. Maybe he would have fallen in love with them and then destroyed all his other work. - 1988 (From Fitzgerald, Michael, Picasso and American Art, Whitney Museum, New York 2007; p.239)
