Chris Gethard Quotes

I just try to keep myself a traditionalist. I liked being an underground comic doing my thing. I want to maintain that. I just do.

I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.

New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.

I am interested in independent cinema and theatre, and they don't make news.

I think anytime there's a big show on a network, people are also looking for what's the indie, stepchild version of this, the real DIY version?

While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.

I'm trying to expand the notion of curating. Exhibitions need not only take place in galleries, need not only involve displaying objects. Art can appear where we expect it least.

I know there's a certain love and affection for the homemade on the Internet, and I'm all for that, too, and I appreciate it in alternative music, and I appreciate it in B-movies and in Sundance, independent films.

I'm not a mass-appeal artist.

There are certainly some artists in New York that I would love to work with. One is Sarah Michelson.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

When you think about Dada and the great moments in Modern Art, it's always the sense of when you're not sure that art is most likely to be occurring.

I've always liked artists like Chris Burden, who would take performances, put them in galleries, and then do things that were on the edge.

When I got to the reading all the work, I was reduced to being an actor in an experimental play that I'd already written. And I didn't want to be an actor.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.

I was a real East Village girl.

There's something very cool about that indie spirit that I try to hang on to even now with the bigger films that I'm working on.

I made video art for quite a long time, and I made this video covering myself in burgers and dancing to Major Lazer and doing covers of Britney Spears songs... I can't remember how I got there, but my teacher said he'd have to fail me because it had mild nudity.

The films, the music, the telly that I like is always a little bit more on the margins.

I don't know what's in store for me, but I know that I want to create work, and I want to create an environment where I can bring in my favorite people and collaborate with them, and do something that is so much weirder and so different from what you'd see in commercial film.