Eric Drooker Quotes
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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.
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In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
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We all know artists who like to collaborate, who like to work as a team. It all kind of depends what your habitual working method is.
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Street art is about as religious as I get - that's my faith, that even if people screen it out and didn't think they saw it, they did. Even if it was for a split second, it's become part of them and it's affecting them somehow.
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What's that Regina Spektor song? Museums are like mausoleums. Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive. Typically your work will end up in a museum after you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead. But while we're alive, I like to see it in places where it's connected to day-to-day life and making a difference.
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I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.
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As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. Art had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
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When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.
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People don't work in factories, they aren't big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.
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Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago.
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Art is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that frighten or anger us.
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Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as "community."
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If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.
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Whether it's a street poster on a brick wall, a magazine cover on a newsstand, or animation on a movie screen - art is an effective means of communicating with large numbers of people.
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Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.
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Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them. Especially if the picture is very beautiful or very sexy or just really weird, if it has some surreal element in it.
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Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.
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Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.
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I'm accustomed to just working by myself, alone in the room and cranking up the music and just working and getting all into an obsessive state where I'm focused on this thing, and it's the one thing that I feel like I may have a little bit of control over in my life.
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Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive.
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In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history.
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The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television.
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Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.
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When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant.