Art & Creativity Quote by Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein’s deadpan is doing a lot of work here: “I like to pretend” admits the pose while insisting on it. The sentence performs the very Pop trick he built a career on - turning the loud, intimate language of feeling into something that looks manufactured, pre-chewed, already public. It’s not a confession of emptiness so much as a strategy of self-erasure, a way to keep the artist’s ego from hogging the frame when the frame is literally borrowed from comic strips, ads, and industrial printing.

In the 1960s, when Abstract Expressionism still treated the canvas as a psychic seismograph, Lichtenstein shows up with Benday dots, hard edges, and melodrama delivered in quotation marks. “Nothing to do with me” is a provocation against the romantic idea that authenticity requires visible suffering or a signature “touch.” His touch, famously, is a simulation of no-touch: brushstrokes that look printed, printing that looks painted. The “pretend” is key because the alibi never fully holds. Choosing what to copy, how to crop it, how to scale it to monumentality - those are personal decisions disguised as impersonal procedure.

The subtext is also defensive. Pop artists were accused of being cold, cynical, even parasitic. Lichtenstein flips the charge into a principle: if modern life is already mediated by mass images, then sincerity can look like plagiarism and originality can look like editing. He’s claiming a new kind of authorship - not self-expression as diary, but self-expression as curation, distance, and control.