A Quote by Ben Eine

The art that I do is for the people. It is about engaging a new audience who wouldn't necessarily go to art galleries and museums and painting on the street is the best way to do that.
Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.
Street art belongs on the street. But I'm a working street artist and I earn my money selling art in the style of street art via galleries.
In my mornings I can do what I like - go to art galleries, museums and things, go to lunch with people.
Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public - as well as artists - also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations.
My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention.
When it comes to the street-art world, there are a lot of people who realize if they go out and put up a few pieces of street art and photograph them really well, even if their locations weren't actually that high-profile or dangerous, with the level of exposure they get from the Internet, with a large audience, they can maintain that rebel cache by having it be theoretically documented street art.
You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.
When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.
Exposure to the reproductions [of Corbis-owned fine art photographs] is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries.
I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
Never did much art till I was in my 30s, except for painting video sets, designing record covers and T-shirts, and making zines and stuff. I thought I was too punk for art and felt grossed out by white-room galleries and art people.
Sometime when I was in my mid-twenties I noticed, "Hey, even I don't go into too many art galleries. Why? Because I don't like the vibe in them. If even I'm not going into galleries, then who goes into art galleries in the first place?" It's just a certain, very narrow percentage of the population.
I look at art all the time. I go to the museums and galleries every week. That really is like food for me.
I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.
Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.
The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important. It's about making a work that is inspired by something preexisting but changes it to have a new value and meaning that doesn't in any way take away from the original - and, in fact, might provide the original with a second life or a new audience.
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