I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, 'Look, I made a career out of carefully and craftfully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers.'
I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.
I think comedy is an angry art form; it's an outsider art form.
The most fascinating part is how fashion just attracts all these social rejects, if you will, from around the world, encourages individuality. They're the people who make the industry tick.
I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.
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?
Diane Arbus is one of the most mysterious, enigmatic, and frighteningly daring artists of the 20th century. Her work emerged from a deeply private place and profoundly affected all those who came into contact with it.
Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.
The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.
What I'm doing is art - it's low-brow art but there's a magic in that.
I think, since the beginning, I have been attracted to unconventional films.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Culturally, it's really funny to me that people respect the weird guy as an artist. There can be a curmudgeon in the corner with spiders building nests in his hair, and he hasn't bathed for three weeks, but for whatever reason, he's more creative than the guy sitting next to him that's showered and is talking to everybody.
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 I came into improv, it was almost like an outsider art form.
I just didn't really relate to Kurt Cobain. There was nothing very glamorous about him.
I think comedy is an angry art form; it's an outsider art form. Anger and comedy are really connected. If I'm angry about something I will try to think about something funny about it to lighten the load of the anger and cope with the anger.
I feel as though perhaps there's not a great match between the content I'm attracted to and the content that is considered attractive to some of the more major or more traditionally financed entities.
I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.
Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.
The films, the music, the telly that I like is always a little bit more on the margins.
When artists who are not associated with the typical infrastructure get recognition, that becomes a cultural movement.
I only learned about Darger a couple years ago, when I kept seeing his name in reference to my artwork, so I looked him up. I wouldn't consider him an influence because I'd already established my current style before learning about him, but I enjoy his work a lot.
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.
Generationally, I relate to Basquiat's culture and the essence of his life story.
