«POP ART IS FOR EVERYONE»

I've always found minimalism a bit empty in the way it simultaneously rejects the seriousness and spiritual ambition of high modernist art, and yet is still abstract. Why be abstract if you don't believe in the pursuit of the absolute, which, as the art historian John Golding wrote, has driven abstract artists from Kandinsky to Rothko? A Donald Judd sculpture always in the end seems like a style-conscious arrangement. The reputation of such work is hugely inflated.

By contrast, the pop artists rejected modernism where it hurt. They dispensed with its urge to abstraction. Pop truly ended the introspective pursuits of modernist abstract art. They put art back in the world. And it has stayed there. The vitality of the best art for 50 years now has always come back to the social. This can produce triteness. But it also gives us art that matters.

The Guardian
July 1 2009