Barry McGee Quotes

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

The city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.

When you walk down the street and see something in a crazy spot, there's something powerful about that. The street will always be an important part of getting art out there for me.

I love the idea of bringing my work to the general public, not just people who go to gallery openings.

The art that I do is for the people. It is about engaging a new audience who wouldn't necessarily go to art galleries and museums and painting on the street is the best way to do that.

The best art is on the street.

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.

Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.

I love to paint and beautify the most unexpected of places - I've painted everything from doorways to trains but have always wanted to do something really huge and different.

For me, it's mostly about having stuff on the street. You're walking down the street, you do it every day, and suddenly there's something that wasn't there yesterday: something bright and cheerful and different. It might stay there for a year; maybe it will disappear.

I don't have this obsessive need to do street art all the time because it's already opened doors for me.

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

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.

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.

I want people to get inspired by public space - their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.

Melbourne, where I grew up, is one of the street art capitals of the world. Something about discovering freshly painted walls always fills me with optimism; it's autonomous and democratic, and reminds me that maybe people are paying attention after all.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant.

I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.

Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere –- on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes.

I've seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I've seen beautiful art in museums. I've seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.

Spraypainting a shop shutter turns an ugly, boring thing into something interesting and colourful. I think you'd have to be a pretty negative person to find fault in it.

Street art belongs on the street. But I'm a working street artist and I earn my money selling art in the style of street art via galleries.

When you place art in the shops, it's a way to make it more accessible.

Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public - as well as artists - also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations.