What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
-- Andy Warhol The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)
Andy Warhol's Green Coca-Cola Bottles
I use naïve imitation. This is not because I have no imagination or because I wish to say something about the everyday world. I imitate 1. objects and 2. created objects, for example, signs, objects made without the intention of making 'art' and which naïvely contain a functional contemporary magic. I try to carry these even further through my own naïveté, which is not artificial.
-- Claes Oldenburg, in "Claes Oldenburg, or the things of this world" Art International 7:9 (1963)
Everybody has called Pop Art "American " painting, but it's actually industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner and its values seem more askew . . . . I think the meaning of my work is that it's industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, so it won't be American; it will be universal.
-- Roy Lichtenstein, in "What is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters" Art News 62:7 (1963)
