Reappropriation Quotes

I think that there was a lot of fantasy projected onto me, and that resulted in a reappropriation and re-characterization of who I am.

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

Tumblr culture and the whole reappropriation-without-context thing are a double-edged sword in that they both raise awareness of my work and also kind of devalue it at the same time.

I'm a whitebread cracker. That's my favorite white person slur: "whitebread". The other day, someone came up to me and said, "What's up, whitebread?" And I was like, "That's not even an insult. That's just my race plus a food. I can do that, too, black bean soup! Stay out of this, Asian chicken platter!"

We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys; rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

In the U.K. especially, dance music goes in cycles. It's often kids reappropriating sounds they loved when they were younger, but were too young to be a part of.

So for instance in rap music, you very often hear words that would seem very racist, or very misogynous or very homophobic but in some of those instances, the words are being taken back or redefined so that they lose their injurious quality.

You'll get a kid in Liberia wearing a Tupac T-shirt, and for us, that's zef. People try to say it's like trash, but it's not really trash. It's putting things together you think are cool.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

I don't want to reclaim the word 'tranny.' I don't want anyone to refer to me as 'tranny.'

My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.

I just didn't like the word 'gay.' I still don't like it. It's a dumb way of describing sexuality. I like 'queer' or other words, but 'gay' is a word that had a completely different-meaning word and has been reappropriated. I just don't like it.

One man's trash that's another man's come up.

Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.