Eric Drooker famous quotes

I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.
-- Eric Drooker

#Tragedy #Comedy #Easier

As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
-- Eric Drooker

#Running #Art #Sex

What's that Regina Spektor song? Museums are like mausoleums. Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive. Typically your work will end up in a museum after you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead. But while we're alive, I like to see it in places where it's connected to day-to-day life and making a difference.
-- Eric Drooker

#Song #Artist #Thinking

If you make a street poster and literally paste it on the street in a city like New York, where it's such a mixed population and so densely populated, and it stays up for a full week and doesn't get covered up by something else or pulled down, you will have fifty thousand people who will have seen it. It will be the poorest of the poor - some homeless man who lives on the street will see it and probably appreciate it, or some businessman or landlord will see it. Everyone will see it. And whether or not they even realize that they saw it, on some level it's affecting their consciousness.
-- Eric Drooker

#New York #Men #Covered Up

The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Museums #Clients

When I was in my early twenties I was doing tenant organizing - rent strikes, specifically - in my building. I think that was how I started doing poster art. It was something very concrete.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Thinking #Twenties

I think for an artist there are so many things to make pictures of now, that everyone else may be suffering, but at least artists will just be stimulated by it all.
-- Eric Drooker

#Artist #Thinking #Suffering

I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Real #Thinking

Art is one of the few ways we have of dealing with things that frighten or anger us.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Way #Art Is

Art is one of the few places where you can put it in a constructive way where it won't burn you up inside or hurt anyone.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Hurt #Way

People don't work in factories, [they aren't] big muscular guys. The working class is flabby because they're sitting in front of a computer all day, but it's still their labor being extracted.
-- Eric Drooker

#Class #People #Guy

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been on class war theme. It's been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. They may have guns and pepper spray and helicopters and F16s and the whole U.S. military on their side, but when it comes down to it, we still have the numbers.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Military #War

I try to, at least once or twice a week, have someone over and model, usually a dancer friend or a poet or someone to come over and just stay still for me. Depending on how exhibitionist they are, it will determine the finished work. And I say, "You're the muse; you come up with it. I'll draw you however you want."
-- Eric Drooker

#Dancer #Trying #Want

Street posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.
-- Eric Drooker

#Neighbor #Posters #Last Words

I don't even believe in magic, or ghosts or anything like that, and yet in a city like New York, on the subway, I definitely see ghosts and art seems to have some magical properties.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #New York #Believe

Poster art was always my way of being involved in the conversation. So it wasn't just a one-way conversation with the police yelling at us or freaking us out. Street posters allowed you to have the last word.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Yelling #Police

Everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, "No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too." No one wants to be part of the 1%.
-- Eric Drooker

#Men #Want #Cop

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Years #Trying

Street art is about as religious as I get - that's my faith, that even if people screen it out and didn't think they saw it, they did. Even if it was for a split second, it's become part of them and it's affecting them somehow.
-- Eric Drooker

#Religious #Art #Thinking

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Real #Fall

In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history.
-- Eric Drooker

#Country #Europe #People

We all know artists who like to collaborate, who like to work as a team. It all kind of depends what your habitual working method is.
-- Eric Drooker

#Team #Artist #Kind

I'm accustomed to just working by myself, alone in the room and cranking up the music and just working and getting all into an obsessive state where I'm focused on this thing, and it's the one thing that I feel like I may have a little bit of control over in my life.
-- Eric Drooker

#May #Littles #Rooms

Most visual artists, just like most writers, tend to be solitary. While they're doing the art, that is. They may have a crazy orgy that morning, but at a certain point they kick everybody out, and say: "Come, go home. Yeah, I had a great time too." And then you're alone again, and then you're freshly inspired and energized.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Morning #Crazy

Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.
-- Eric Drooker

#Artist #Cracks #Culture

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.
-- Eric Drooker

#Political #Abstract #Ifs

There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Facts #Form

If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.
-- Eric Drooker

#People #Want #Subway

Whether it's a street poster on a brick wall, a magazine cover on a newsstand, or animation on a movie screen - art is an effective means of communicating with large numbers of people.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Wall #Mean

Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago.
-- Eric Drooker

#Eight #People #Chicago

With what we've been taught is the proper role of art, which is that you want to have it very neatly matted and framed and put on a white wall in some room where only a certain class of people are going to go in.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Wall #People

When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.
-- Eric Drooker

#Teenager #Character #Tragedy

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Happy Endings #Corny

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending.
-- Eric Drooker

#Mean #Greek #Tragedy

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them. Especially if the picture is very beautiful or very sexy or just really weird, if it has some surreal element in it.
-- Eric Drooker

#Beautiful #Sexy #Art

Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
-- Eric Drooker

#Friday #Art #School

The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Real #Celebrity Gossip

Illustrators are usually illustrating something big or commercial if not outright advertising. It's a form of prostitution, but that's cool because we don't have any moral hang-up about it.
-- Eric Drooker

#Moral #Advertising #Form

Sometime when I was in my mid-twenties I noticed, "Hey, even I don't go into too many art galleries. Why? Because I don't like the vibe in them. If even I'm not going into galleries, then who goes into art galleries in the first place?" It's just a certain, very narrow percentage of the population.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Twenties #Population

When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant.
-- Eric Drooker

#Artist #Chinese #Neighborhood

We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.
-- Eric Drooker

#Song #Spring #Book

We used to call the 1% the ruling class, but America's never felt comfortable using that terminology. It was taboo to talk about class war. Americans are okay talking about it like this; everyone wants to be part of the 99%, even the cops are like, "No, no, man. I'm part of the 99% too." No one wants to be part of the 1%.
-- Eric Drooker

#War #Men #Cop

The unusual thing about doing street poster art - or something with a conscious social critique in it - is that the artist thinks they're a little in control, focusing and trying to make a specific point. But even then, when you look at it a few years later, you realize you were just working through some of the usual feelings you were going through during that time.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Thinking #Feelings

Typically your work will end up in a museum [after] you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead.
-- Eric Drooker

#Museums #Archives #Ends

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.
-- Eric Drooker

#Thinking #Tragedy #Trying

The art was just a way of hooking people in, saying: "Hey, maybe there's something cool about the tenant meeting. If the picture's really cool and weird, maybe I should check this out." And I think all of my art has really developed out of that realization.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Thinking #People

In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #School #Sake

There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.
-- Eric Drooker

#Two #People #Tragedy

The problem with prostitution in my experience is that it's often unsatisfying.
-- Eric Drooker

#Problem #Prostitution

Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as "community."
-- Eric Drooker

#Community

Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive.
-- Eric Drooker

#Artist #Thinking #Museums

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Mean #People

The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.
-- Eric Drooker

#Challenges #Looks #Moments

Infiltrating the mainstream was a natural extension of my street art. I've always tried to communicate ideas to the public as directly as possible.
-- Eric Drooker

#Art #Ideas #Natural