"The essence of [Andy] Warhol's genuis was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened."

"[Art critic Clement Greenberg] made the case for the historical necessity of abstraction. Avant-garde artists were compelled to make nonrepresentational paintings, he argued, because of the mass production of commercially manufactured culture - kitsch. Kitsch - popular fiction, Hollywood movies, and so on - was realistic, and its subject was the satisfactions of middle-class life under consumer capitalism. Avant-garde artists responded by making their subject art itself. Avant-garde art, Greenberg believed, was art that explored its own formal possibilites. It was art about art."

- "Top of the Pops" by Louis Menand, 1/11/10 issue of The New Yorker