Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.
We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that.
I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
I don't see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear 'pop,' you're like, 'Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,' and I feel like, 'Uh-uh. That's not me.'
Art is nowhere near as dangerous as it should be.
Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.
This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable.
N.W.A had something in common with the Rolling Stones and MC5 and groups like that: the voice of rebellion. It's rebellion against your parents. It's rebellion against the system. It's rebellion against society.
I did 'Mala Noche' as a way to do something that was outside of the system, because I was outside of the system, and I deliberately chose material that Hollywood wouldn't touch in a million years.
Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.
In the '50s, critics used to say I had a 'dangerous' act.
Isn't art about breaking rules, about challenging existing systems, isn't it about discovering meaning in things or situations before others see anything in them??
I was raised on GG Allen, Divine, Elvira and Marilyn Manson. I was always more interested in those button pushing, transgressive artists and they made a lot of good money doing it.
Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.
A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.
I think there's very little interesting in art that is not transgressive in some way. And I don't think that's a very revolutionary thing to say.
One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.
In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
I like the idea of subversively communicating with people... so that you make people see things in different ways.
I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.
I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.
I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value.
This phrase, 'culture jamming,' was very much in vogue in the 1990s when these superbrands sort of emerged and started kind of projecting their names onto ever more surfaces.
