Shepard Fairey Quotes

The whole world is covered in graffiti. No one cares. It's just part of urban noise.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.

What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.

I hate graffiti. It's not yours - don't draw on it! Is it that hard to comprehend?

The best art is on the street.

Most people think I do street art, so I do everything for nothing. I'm an urchin who paints walls and does work for nothing. That's the first misconception about street artists, that we just paint for nothing.

Shepard Fairey, the street artist responsible for President Obama's 'Hope' poster, is now facing vandalism charges in Detroit. It's pretty serious. Detroit officials say the artist's spray paint caused over $9,000 worth of improvements.

Graved inside of it, "Italy".

Is graffiti art or vandalism? That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don't like to use the word 'art' at all.

The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.

Brandalism Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn't matter how great you were, it'll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.

Success is no longer content. It's how it sells.

If you just turn to your paper or television each day, there are thousands of stories that are much more shocking than the gallery artworks.

The media is going to stick a label on records. And the public is going to pick it up from that. And that's what I was getting sick of-the whole analyzation thing.

Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded. You see the brands - Nike, Puma, Coke - all over their bodies. Pretty soon you'll go to a family and say, "$100,000 if we can tattoo Pepsi on your child's forehead, and we'll have it removed when he's twenty-one. A hundred grand."

A lot of people thought I got famous as a studio artist, then decided to cash in on it. But it actually was just a matter of survival for many years, and I felt it was really important for me to be able to say whatever I wanted with my street art and fine art.