Andy Warhol's early paintings did not try to express the physical properties of their medium, but rather are flat and graphic.

Warhol's artwork did what Marcel Duchamp's Fountain had accomplished nearly a half century earlier: it shocked and provoked critics and artists alike.

Projects such as Celebration exploit the nostalgia for a supposedly "better" and more peaceful time. in Celebration's case, the 1950s, an era of bucolic clapboard houses and boundless opportunity. This is a myopic view, and ignores the many huge crises that either began or came to head in the 50s (The Korean War, the constant threat posed by nuclear weapons, the thousands of children crippled by polio and multiple increasingly apparent environmental issues caused by decades of neglect, to name a few), creating a view of an era that never truly existed.

(Worth noting that the 50s were also a politically and economically abnormal time for the U.S.; it's not often that a country becomes an economic powerhouse due to essentially all its rivals being hobbled either by the aftermath of a World War or the rise of authoritarian regimes. The supposed utopia of American suburbia in the 50s was always an artificial construction of geopolitics, and in my opinion, the following decades simply saw us return to an equilibrium of sorts.)

The Star Wars franchise is a veritable Frankenstein's monster of the entertainment industry,drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Akira Kurosawa classics, spaghetti Westerns, and 1960s New Wave science fiction. This mixing of pre-existing elements (and arguably the aping of other's work) is the backbone of postmodernism.

Postmodernism abhors the logical and the straightforward. It relies on the surreal, the strange, and the reference within reference.

This reminds me of Rothko's choice to use massive canvases for his paintings, to impress a great effect upon the viewer. The result is something similar to the 19th century idea of the sublime, of being overwhelmed.

Here, Kaprow criticizes the Surrealists for not straying from convention and not truly grasping the use of automatism in artmaking. He claims that their perceived plainness to American artists is a result of Surrealism's reliance on overdone cliches rather than real ingenuity.

These line lament Pollock's alcoholism, deterioration and his stalled art career during his last years.

I think this refers to the increased secularization of society throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Whereas before religion had defined entire cultures and ways of life, in the 19th century started having an increasingly marginal role in politics and thought, compared to the almost sacrosanct role religious institutions had played in philosophy and government centuries prior. In many places, religion came to be viewed as something retricted to people's private lives and personal identities rather than a driving social force. Greenberg makes the comparison to show the difficulties facing art in the modern era.