A Quote by Tony Shafrazi

By the late '50s, something was happening in England, and it got to be quite exciting. The music world then started to explode with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was an incredible time with this mixture of independence in art, fashion, and the explosion of the pop sensibility. London was certainly at the center of it all for a few years. And as far as art is concerned, I think that sensibility of what was later called Pop art started in England even before America. And so I was lucky to be there.
You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.
There are many more important things in life than fashion. But fashion, to me, is part of pop culture. And I'm an art collector. I'm obsessed with art and pop culture. And I say that there is fame, fashion, art, music and entertainment, including celebrity, that really moves the needle in society.
The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the Beatles especially, and then the Rolling Stones and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our nouvelle vague in Britain, films that talk about real life.
The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the 'Beatles' especially, and then the 'Rolling Stones' and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our 'nouvelle vague' in Britain, films that talk about real life.
In '68 I was 13 years old, so I was a child, but I felt a lot of excitement in listening to things, looking at the pop art coming over from America. My father was an art collector, and he was coming home with these strange pieces of art that weren't exposed in museums. At the time, it was quite revolutionary, very adventurous.
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.
The Beatles and Ray Charles were in the same charts together, and that was just called pop music - it wasn't called soul or rock. The best pop music just stands out as something that's just original, and I think it should all be called pop again.
I started drawing comics, and at first I was very influenced by the whole pop art movement, you know, Batman was on TV and all that pop art stuff? But then my next influence was in 1966, or maybe it was '65, I don't know. Somebody showed me a copy of the "East Village Other", which was an underground newspaper. And... it had comics in it! And they weren't superhero comics.
When I went to college, and I went to art school, I started to realize that Warhol was cool and that pop art was fun.
When I started Dylan's Candy Bar in 2001, I wanted it to be a place that merged my love of pop culture, fashion, art and music with candy. Since then, we have been fortunate to pioneer artistic partnerships with many legends.
I'm very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.
During the last 35 years, the artists multiplied, the public grew enormously, the economy exploded, and so-called contemporary art became fashionable. All these parameters changed the art world form its previous aspects and fundamentals - the explosion of museums and institutions, explosion of Biennales and Triennials, explosion of money, explosion of interest, explosion of artists, explosion of countries interested in contemporary exhibitions, explosion of the public. Not to see that is to be more than blind.
In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.
The great music for so many artists - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.
I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.
Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.
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