Underground Art Quotes

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

A real New Yorker is always someone who came here from somewhere else to avoid some kind of persecution, often sexual-preference based, or to be discovered in one of the infinite-though-no-longer-thriving alternative scenes, i.e. theater, music, dance, vaudeville, art, drag, or, in those of the greatest egos, to be 'the next Andy Warhol.'

It is a different world, the underground. When you hit mainstream, you hit a saturation level and that turns some people off. When you are on more low-key stuff, it works to your advantage and it creates a buzz on the streets. At that point, the sky is the limit.

I remember reading about police arresting this filmmaker making this freaky movie and his name was John Waters. And I was like, wow, someone in Baltimore is doing something creative? I didn't know there were people running off and making eight-millimeter movies. Then I got to New York and realized, oh, there's a whole world of people who do these things. I was utterly bored being in the suburbs, but I didn't know why I was bored.

There was a fascinating handmade poster scene in Chicago in the '90s, and I became friends with many of the artists; the posters were often more impressive than the bands.

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.

The films, the music, the telly that I like is always a little bit more on the margins.

I gave away 'Life in Hell' when it was a little 'zine, and sold it at record stores for $1, and I knew from the time that I first did it that I would continue to do it, because it was fun.

The filmmaker Amos Poe was a huge inspiration for me by making guerrilla-style punk films on the streets of New York and - well, it's just a lot of painters and artists and filmmakers all within that scene, and it's very, very important to me.

I think there's so many amazing LGBTQ artists, ranging from commercial to underground, that are influencing people at large.

An underground hit didn't make any money and it cost a dollar to get in.

In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

I remember when I started performing, I thought, 'Why is this something that we do after hours, underground?' I was waiting on the world to change and the idea of this art to become mainstream, and I think that's what 'RuPaul's Drag Race' has really accomplished in such an eloquent way.

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues,' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.

I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.

I used to be a huge fan of Heavy Metal magazine growing up, and I was exposed to Cobalt there and fell in love with the character and the world. I've tried to track it down and pursue it myself to make a movie out of it. Also I felt like the thing that's cool about Cobalt is it does have a culty kind of underground quality to it that I really like.

I was going to be a musician, no matter what it took. I supported myself with blue-collared jobs so I could write music and be in a band and play shows. I even got into an underground art scene. I was going to do whatever.

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.

I'm happy that grime remains underground. A lot of people talk like it's some underrated or ignored genre, but to me, that's the beauty of it.

I like the word 'underground'... 'independent' carries a stigma of whininess. 'Underground' means a good time.

I think anytime there's a big show on a network, people are also looking for what's the indie, stepchild version of this, the real DIY version?

It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House... All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.

I like V-Nasty a lot, and I know anytime I like an artist and the majority of people really don't like her, I know it's something special. That's the same way I felt about Gucci.