Eric Drooker Quotes
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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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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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If you make a street poster and literally paste it on the street in a city like New York, where it's such a mixed population and so densely populated, and it stays up for a full week and doesn't get covered up by something else or pulled down, you will have fifty thousand people who will have seen it. It will be the poorest of the poor - some homeless man who lives on the street will see it and probably appreciate it, or some businessman or landlord will see it. Everyone will see it. And whether or not they even realize that they saw it, on some level it's affecting their consciousness.
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Everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, "No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too." No one wants to be part of the 1%.
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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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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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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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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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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 is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that frighten or anger us.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation.
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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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Art is one of the few places where you can put it in a constructive way where it won't burn you up inside or hurt anyone.