Ben Eine Quotes

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.

My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.

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.

Graffiti is usually a protest - ink on walls - or has a reason for being naughty or aggressive.

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

I've realised that there's art in everything we do in London. Suddenly, a photo of two boys sitting on a wall in tracksuits with a dog can go online and be considered a sick photo. That's what we've done to London.

I was brought up in south London and I started out in the world of graffiti when I was about 14 because I wanted to be part of that hooded tracksuit gang thing.

As a street artist, I'm used to sharing my stuff with the public. It's a communal experience. I've learned not to be so precious, but rather to enjoy the process.

People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

Street art, unlike graffiti, adds to the environment and is a positive experience for the artist and community.

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

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

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.

The courage to be yourself is the essence of hip hop

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.

If surrealism ever comes to adopt a particular line of moral conduct, it has only to accept the discipline that Picasso has accepted and will continue to accept.

There's never any graffiti in the hotel. Although in the Gents a couple of weeks ago I did see someone had drawn a lady's part. Quite detailed. The guy obviously had talent.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don't need an education to understand it, and there's no admission fee.

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.

I hate the idea of street art. With music, I just needed my brain and my voice, which didn't cost anything.