What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves.
Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.
All advertising advertises advertising.
I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.
I worry a lot about people using games just for marketing, to get people to buy more stuff, which I think would be the worst possible use.
It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
Just get on any major highway, and eventually it will dead-end in a Disney parking area large enough to have its own climate, populated by large nomadic families who have been trying to find their cars since the Carter administration.
We grew up in a very material-lacking socialist society, but today China is a capitalist society. It's very materialistic. It's full of desire and luxury goods.
Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won't be American; it will be universal.
People recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.
Practically everything from hairstyles to lifestyles is endorsed as some sort of drug to be taken Now for Instant Relief.
I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.
Warhol came from an ordinary family and he had a profound understanding about capitalism and material culture. He was probably one of the few Western artists - or artists from the United States - that could be considered a true product of his time and brought out that kind of spirit of the culture.
God forbid that the day should ever come when, in the American mind, the thought of man as a consumer shall submerge the old American thought of man as a creature of God, endowed with unalienable rights.
It's a good thing I was born in this century, when superfluous television seems to be part of the economy.
Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
In the 1950s, as food rationing ended, I remember a plentiful supply of sweets for the first time.
When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and Smiley shirts. Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend.
A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.
Today's average American is more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedom.
You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.
