Ma Jian Quotes

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

There was a fascinating handmade poster scene in Chicago in the '90s, and I became friends with many of the artists; the posters were often more impressive than the bands.

When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this 'cause we both were outcasts: we wasn't allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.

When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado's a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.

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.

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.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.

What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.

Hip-hop is supposed to uplift and create, to educate people on a larger level and to make a change.

I grew up around hip-hop so I didn't think it was about being cool or being black or being white or whatever.

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.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

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

I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism. I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition; it's amazing.

Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

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

I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

I consider myself a multi-platform artist - not just a street artist - but the audience I found through street art has created many of the opportunities I now have on other platforms.

Theo van Doesburg wanted to teach in the Bauhaus in 1922. I refused, however, to appoint him since I considered him to be too aggressive and too rigidly theoretical: he would have wrought havoc in the Bauhaus through his fanatic attitude, which ran counter to my own broader approach.

Revolution is Tupac showing a young artist that he can scribble in a notebook and it's worth a lot.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

When I started working at Pictures On Walls, I'd been hanging out with Banksy for a few years travelling around the world together painting stuff, and then we moved into a new office and wanted to do screenprinting.

I remember when I started performing, I thought, 'Why is this something that we do after hours, underground?' I was waiting on the world to change and the idea of this art to become mainstream, and I think that's what 'RuPaul's Drag Race' has really accomplished in such an eloquent way.