Transgressive Art Quotes

When I first saw 'House on Haunted Hill' as a kid in Baltimore, and the skeleton went out on the wire, and the thousand kids in the audience went crazy... My whole life, I've tried to at least equal that cinema anarchy. I came close with the end of 'Pink Flamingos,' but I didn't tie with it.

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.

Lou Reed's spirit and the way he did things was so important. Him and his music mean so much to me as the years go by.

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.

I am fascinated a) by transgressive art and b) what happens beyond the boundaries.

Always, European art cinema has been the most threatening and the grimmest and the most transgressive, I think.

Roman Candles was shown in a church, and so was Eat Your Makeup, so was Mondo Trasho, and so was Multiple Maniacs (1970). It's hard to imagine that churches showed these movies but a few in the '60s, like St. Mark's Church, or on the Bowery, they always were left-wing.

Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

I am not by nature the kind of creator who is transgressive in order to be transgressive.

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.

It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.

I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point, but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.

I loved the idea of the fact that the way, like I said, they colored outside of the lines. You know, there was rules that they didn't have to follow. And you got -you got - you could get more of a sensational thrill, all right, with some of these exploitation movies or art films, or you could get something you wouldn't see at the normal cineplex.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

I remember John Waters's 'Pink Flamingos,' that was the film where I realized you could do anything you want - there were no boundaries.

We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.

Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.

I love John Waters. There's stuff in it that's beyond the boundaries of my taste, but his movies have always been like that.

I am not very extreme in my life. But I'm very attracted to art that works with extremes and works with limits, that transgresses limits and transcends limits and crosses borders and has a certain boldness.

I always used to deny this, but I guess what I'm really saying is that I was writing to shock... And I dug deep and dredged up all kinds of vile things which fascinated me at the time.

I think that when you are accused of being in bad taste it can be quite positive. You're challenging the notions of polite society. I'd like to put across the notion that bad taste is actually good for you.

I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.