Top 1200 Graffiti Art Quotes & Sayings

In Afghanistan I was doing street art because it was more open, but when I had a show, only men would come. I said, I'm an artist not only for men, but for women too. So that's why I like graffiti.

Should #? graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that

Many people decorate their homes with designer graffiti, even though most of them would probably have real graffiti scoured off the walls of their buildings.

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

Anyone who asks if graffiti is really art should be cast out into a field, because they're Neanderthals.

I love graffiti because it enables kids from every social extraction to do something that brings them closer to art, when they normally wouldn't be stimulated to be visually creative. Graffiti helps to develop an awareness of immediate expressive and uncontrolled freedom.

My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art.

I have always been a Peter Blake fan and love street art and graffiti. I really like this street-art collective called Faile. They're from Brooklyn and make these prints of beautiful women.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

I think drum'n'bass music did for the electronic world what graffiti did for the world of art because it was raw and everybody wanted to take from the raw.

Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.

Graffiti is a pathetic attempt at anonymous recognition.

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking.

Berlin is still a very edgy place, a very cosmopolitan place. It's a place where completely different ideas and cultures come together and clash in a very warm way. In a very warm-hearted way. It's a very young city. It's a vibrant city. It's an exciting city. It's a city that's also scarred by history. I think that's to be celebrated and graffiti is to be celebrated. Graffiti in Berlin is very different than when they spray something on the wall dividing the west bank and Israel. And should be treated as such in Berlin.

Gray hair is God's graffiti.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.

I didnt start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didnt know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Is graffiti art or vandalism? That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don't like to use the word 'art' at all.

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn't become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you're the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.

I did an art show for Donald Trump at his house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was a bunch of pop art and stuff like that, so I wasn't doing any graffiti at that time, so I'd say from about 2000 to 2006, I wasn't doing any graffiti.

I'm an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. I use the garden soil like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. You'd be surprised what the soil can do if you let it be your canvas.

One piece of graffiti doesn't mean much. Forty pieces of graffiti might mean something... It's all about connecting the dots.

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

When you can't think of anything else, photograph graffiti, nudes, or plants.

Street art, unlike graffiti, adds to the environment and is a positive experience for the artist and community.

Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.

Graffiti is something written on a wall, and, of course, art can be exhibited or produced anywhere: a wall is just another venue.

I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.

I grew up around New York, graffiti culture.

Currently, it was leading him through a neighborhood that was on the downside of whatever curve you hoped you'd bought your property on the upside of. Graffiti and garbage were everywhere here. They were everywhere in the city, if it came to that, but elsewhere the garbage was better quality, and the graffiti was close to being correctly spelled. The whole area was waiting for something to happen, like a really bad fire.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.

HIP-HOP HAS DIFFERENT ELEMENTS DEALING WITH MUSIC, RAP, GRAFFITI ART, B-BOYS (WHAT YOU CALL BREAK BOYS)... AND ALSO DEALING WITH CULTURE, AND A WHOLE MOVEMENT DEALING WITH WISDOM AND UNDERSTANDING, AS WELL AS PEACE UNITY AND FUN.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.

If Graffiti is art and art is a crime then how come piccaso never done time?

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.

A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body.

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

I wasn't trying to turn graffiti into an art form. I just wanted to learn about art. I wanted to learn this game.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

Graffiti art brings you back to your human skills - your spirit and what your being is really about.

All the work I did was to challenge politics, culture, and women's rights. I felt like I really wanted to break out. That's why I wanted to use graffiti. It's more open. I don't need people to come to an exhibition. Graffiti gives a voice to the walls.

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

Graffiti is art, but you don't see graffiti in the National Gallery. Graffiti is on the street - that's where it belongs.

I had just been doing graffiti around New York and this real estate investor guy had walked through meat packing in New York and saw some of my graffiti. He was impressed and asked if I sold canvases. I really had not made any canvases of my graffiti work yet, but told him I could make one for him. He then commissioned me to make ten paintings and put on my first art show. Between the sold out show and the cops chasing after me it created a lot of media and I've been doing really well since then.

I hate graffiti. It's not yours - don't draw on it! Is it that hard to comprehend?

Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.

I didn't have much of a life in crime as a graffiti writer.