Paul Di Filippo Quotes

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

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.

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

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

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.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

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.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

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.

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.

The Internet doesn't always play a great role for art, especially art in the street, as people take what they see for the final image of it. But the most interesting thing about street art is to see it for real, to understand what it means and where it's displayed.

I'm a painter. I was a graffiti artist, and I painted all over the world.

I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.

Painting, music, photography, and visual art have been creative forms of expression for me for decades.

I'm actually really obsessed with folk art.

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.

When you look at Banksy's work as a catalogue of ideas, it's undeniably brilliant. Going back to my days doing stencil work back in the 80s I knew that it wasn't exactly the most demanding work: it's like printing, but then Warhol was a printer.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.

In college, all my friends were graffiti writers, but I never wrote graffiti. I wanted to participate and do something cool on the street, so I'd make these portraits of people. I'd isolate them on a white wall, make a silkscreen of it, and do these portraits in bathrooms and all around. That's how I started the Polaroids.