Top 1200 Graffiti Artist Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.

Graffiti is one of the 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 someone smile while they're having a piss.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.

Being able to hear an artist and emulate them has been a huge part of being successful as a producer and co-writer. I think it's a problem when a producer comes in to work with an artist, and you can't hear the artist as well anymore. It's very important to me to be invisible.

Now the expectation is that, once the public decides that the artist is gentrified, the public demands that the artist stop growing. And [the public] actually puts all their energy into reasserting or re-establishing what the artist has long ago left behind. Because that's what they want. The source of creativity, the gift that's been given, be damned.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Graffiti is like building a career. And there is a dialogue with the other artists out there mostly fellow writers because a lot of people who don't paint just see a blur when they look at it.

I am writing graffiti on your body. I am drawing the story of how hard we tried.

Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.

The cream-tiled walls were spattered here and there with old dried bloodstains, deep gouges that might have been clawmarks, and all kinds of graffiti. As usual, someone had spelt Cthulhu wrongly.

The artist and the multitude are natural enemies. They always will be, both ways. The artist is an enemy of the multitude, and the multitude is the enemy of the artist. And when the disguise comes off and they're both standing facing one another, they're just there at odds end.

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

A secondhand wardrobe hand clothes doesn't make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, or HIV. I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay doesn't make one witty... the only thing that makes one an artist is making art.

I think that putting merchandising into the hands of the artist themselves is one of the best things for the artist.

I can get inspired just off the energy of Soulja Boy, just his energy, you have to take something from an artist. Everyone may not look at an artist the same way, but it's something that artist is doing that's creating his success.

I was brought up in south London and I started out in the world of graffiti when I was about 14 because I wanted to be part of that hooded tracksuit gang thing.

There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

There's a perception that if an artist produces another artist, they're going to imprint on them. But I'm the opposite.

To many people Michael Jackson seems an elusive personality, but to those who work with him, he is not. This talented artist is a sensitive man, warm, funny, and full of insight. Michael's book 'Moonwalk', provides a startling glimpse of the artist at work and the artist in reflection.

None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

The layers you get in graffiti, the ornateness, you can hear it in my music. I paint with my music. It's a form of synaesthesia.

When I was growing up in the 1980s in the Midlands, I felt abandoned and misunderstood. Then I chose drum 'n' bass and graffiti as my subcultures - which didn't really help.

One of the interesting things about skateboarding and graffiti is that skateboarding exists in the documentation of an act.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

Because the artist deals in future realities, he always seeks improvements or changes in the existing reality. This makes the artist, inevitably and invariably, a rebel against the status quo. The artist, day by day, by postulating the new realities of the future, accomplishes peaceful revolution.

I got into DJing and making beats when I was about 17. I was always fascinated by the four elements of hip-hop: you know, writing, rhyming, breakdancing and graffiti.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

Each role demands the right actor. To play an artist, one must be an artist.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

Environmental damage such as graffiti, fly-posting and general littering is a menace that is becoming all too prevalent, not just in inner cities but in many communities - urban and rural.

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

Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.

Street artists want to add something to the environment. They consider the audience, whereas graffiti writers don't care about anyone except themselves, they do it purely for the kick.

If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw.

When I first got into graffiti I thought it was going to change the world. But when, 20-years-later, it still hadn't, I got bored of the self-imposed rules.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

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.

On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.

An artist is an artist because he is not happy with the world, so he creates his own existence.

Becoming an artist cannot be taught. A degree and diligence is not a guarantee that one can become an 'artist.

I was associated with the Artist Placement Group in the early 1970s and David Hall, the video artist, was an Artist Placement Group artist. I was completely broke at that time, and he said to me, "Come and do some teaching" - he was head of department at Maidstone College of Art. And I went and did a couple of teaching days and practically the only person who showed up was David Cunningham [Flying Lizard's main man], with all of this finished work

Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

The purity of finding the right artist, that artist that's gonna be the next hall of famer, that artist that's gonna be the next headliner, lifting people out of their seats at Madison Square Garden, that song that's gonna be sung for hundreds and hundreds of years, that essence remains the same.

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

I like to tell the artist what the song or album means to me, in detail. Then I let the artist run with it and create in an unrestrained manner. Once the artist gets back to me with a few ideas, I like to do the little changes to make it perfectly speak to the audience.

Piracy doesn't hurt an artist unless the artist puts out a bad album.

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

The argument that most lawmakers make about graffiti is that it's illegal because it's an eyesore, but you could easily argue that a lot of advertising is an eyesore.

Artists draw for themselves, If someone draws for them, theyre not an artist. An artist is someone who makes their own music and albums. Artist think music is a drawing, and they draw theirs.

Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

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

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

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

Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.