- Adam Gopnik: Jasper Johns sees it close up; he sees what it's like to be in New York, the heart, the pulsing heart of this consumer culture. He sees what it's really all about as kind of second hand things. It's all this stuff that sort of swims along in the sewer, the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture it what he makes his subject.
- Adam Gopnik: Caricature died so that modern art could live. All of the kind of grotesque indulgences that were previously permissible only in caricature, now became part of the common language of modern art and by breaking down that separation to what was permissible in humorous caricature and what was permissible in great art, Picasso remade the language of the modern portrait.
- Roy Lichtenstein: I think at the beginning a lot of people thought that I was just blowing them up and it was interesting that I was changing the context of a cartoon from mass art to the art of the museums or galleries and just because I redid it and thought of it in a different way, it was different. Well, I don't believe that at all. I think if I blew up a cartoon and brought it into a gallery it would be the same cartoon it was before I brought it into the gallery. My work has something to do, in my mind anyway, with confirming the differences. I'm taking what is normally thought of as low art and I think I've redone every mark in it a different way, in a way that is very hard to explain.
- Jeff Koons: The only thing that the artist can do is to be able to exploit themselves to increase their own parameters of being in the moment. And if the artist can do that and then be an example to a public, that is the most liberating things one can do. The activity of art is absolutely useless and the object is useless.