Graffiti Art Quotes

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?

If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!

Every time he looked at me I felt like I'd touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I'd watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn't think straight when she's that close to electrocution.

I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall.

Nothing about art is a waste of time. "It's the time wasting that gets you somewhere.

Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.

A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.

Blank walls are a shared canvas and we're all artists.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

Most times I look at Shadow and Poet's work, I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.

I laugh at the way some people think graffiti is all selfish tagging and vandalism. Thoughtful street art is like good fiction – it speaks out on behalf of everyone, for us all to see.

If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.

Our children will be told what Israel has done.’ graffiti on the Wall in Bethlehem, opposite Aida refugee camp, 2008

You've been looking like this for months." Leo does something strange with his face. "I don't look like that." "Yeah. You do." "I'll look like that if Daisy dumps me, and she'll dump me if she thinks I lied," Dylan says. "You threw eggs at her head. Odds are she's dumping you anyway." I turn to Leo. "We decided. We said that we weren't telling anyone. We said it was art for art's sake. We said the more people knew, the more chance the cop's pick us up. We said it was you and me, no crew." "Are you sure I didn't say it was to score girls?

We said it was for art's sake. we said the more people who knew, the more chance the cops'd pick us up. We said it was you and me, no crew.' Are you I didn'nt say it was to score girls?

Poetic Terrorism WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ... Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc. Go naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty. Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement... The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

We decided. We said that we weren't telling anyone. We said it was for art's sake. We said the more people who knew, the more chance the cops'd pick us up. We said it was you and me, no crew." "Are you sure I didn't say it was to score girls?" That actually sounds a whole lot like something Leo woud say.

They're cleaning the graffiti! There were some that were really beautiful, no other city in the world had graffiti like Barcelona's. But just try to explain to those brutes what art is. The fuck. They ruin everything.

Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.

Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there.

Art like that doesn’t need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it’s saying without words being spoken.

Few people go to art exhibitions nowadays, the art comes to them!

... when Warner Bros. cancelled the financing for Zoetrope, the Apocalypse Now project was abandoned for a while. After the success of American Graffiti in 1973, George wanted to revive it, but it was still too hot a topic – the war was still on – and notobdy wanted to finance something like that. So George considered his options: What did he really want to say in Apocalypse Now? The message boiled down to the ability of a small group of people to defeat a gigantic power simply by the force of their convictions. And he decided, All right, if it's politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I'll put the essence of the story in outer space and make it happen in a galaxy long ago and far away. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese and the Empire was the United States. And if you have the force, no matter how small you are, you can defeat the overwhelmingly big power. Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version of Apocalypse Now.

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as Death to the aristocrats! and The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood! and May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends! All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form.

Intanto il compito di tutti coloro che considerano le arti con serietà è semplicemente quello di fare del loro meglio per salvare il mondo da quella che nel migliore dei casi sarà una perdita, risultante dall'ignoranza e dalla sconsideratezza: impedire il più scoraggiante fra tutti i mutamenti, quello che a una brutalità estinta ne sostituisce un'altra; anzi, anche se coloro che hanno veramente a cuore le arti sono così deboli e pochi da non poter fare nient'altro, il loro ufficio può esser quello di mantenere viva una traccia di tradizione, di memoria del passato, in modo tale che quando la nuova vita giungerà possa non disperdersi più di tanto nel conferire forme del tutto nuove al proprio spirito. Dove si volgeranno allora per chiedere aiuto, coloro che ben comprendono quale vantaggio una grande arte possa apportare al mondo, e quali danni alla pace e al quieto vivere derivino da una sua assenza? Penso che essi dovranno cominciare col riconoscere che l'arte antica – l'arte dell'intelligenza inconscia, come la si dovrebbe chiamare, che cominciò in una data imprecisata, remota almeno quanto lo sono quegli strani e magistrali graffiti sulle ossa di mammut e oggetti di tal genere ritrovati or è poco nelle stratificazioni del terreno – che quest'arte dell'intelligenza inconscia è definitivamente scomparsa.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to that cave’s beauty, we agreed to stop going. We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off. The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

Todo se volvió cuestión de saber o no saber, mientras el guion era reemplazado por una catarata de improvisaciones. Cortes de pelo, dietas, música grabada de las radios, los ritmos desobedientes de mi cuerpo, el delantal por la túnica, la plaza vacía, minas en tetas en las revistas, el rímel contrabandeado a pesar de mamá, la gimnasia frente al televisor, Mazinger y los Hardy Boys, el Papa visto por un aparatito de cartón con un espejito en la punta, la multidad acalorada por tomos de papilla evangelizadora. Sombra celeste hasta las cejas, auscultación de entrepiernas, corpiños por zapatos de charol, los himnos de la tele como Sancor pero peor, la plaza llena, más Hardy Boys, toqueteos, los primeros asaltos con Coca Cola, polleras plato, comunicados de miles de cifras, minas en tanga, la plaza llena, el americano más vendido, minifaldas, escudos, Kiss y la matanza de pollitos, medias de nailon por vinchas, el fin de las Trillizas de Oro, graffitis silenciados, los domingos eternos para la juventud. Las instrucciones sonámbulas de mis maestras, más minas en bolas, banderitas, blanco y negro, más instrucciones, procedimientos, celeste y blanco, DNI, papeles más, papeles menos, fuga en el siglo XXIII, aros de plástico por anillitos de oro, maestras que nos mostraban —como si en vez de un cuadernillo de defensa civil estuvieran siguiendo un manual de demonología— cómo se evitaba cualquier tipo de peligro si uno lograba pararse debajo del marco de una puerta.

There are many reasons why girls should not travel alone, and I won’t list them, because none of them are original reasons. Besides, there are more reasons why girls should. I have the utmost respect for girls who travel alone, because it’s hard work sometimes. But girls, we just want adventures. We want international best friends and hold-your-breath vistas out of crappy hostel windows. We want to discover moving works of art, sometimes in museums and sometimes in side-street graffiti. We want to hear soul-restoring jam sessions at beach bonfires and to watch celestial dawns spill over villages that haven’t changed since the Middle Ages. We want to fall in love with boys with say-that-again accents. We want sore feet from stay-up-all-night dance parties at just-one-more-drink bars. We want to be on our own even as we sketch and photograph the Piazza San Marco covered in pigeons and beautiful Italian lovers intertwined so that we’ll never forget what it feels like to be twenty-three and absolutely purposeless and single, but in love with every city we visit next. We want to be struck dumb by the baritone echoes of church bells in Vatican City and the rich, heaven-bound calls to prayer in Istanbul and to know that no matter what, there just has to be some greater power or holy magic responsible for all this bursting, delirious, overwhelming beauty in the great, wide, sprawling world. I tucked my passport into my bag. Girls, we don’t just want to have fun; we want a whole lot more out of life than that.

There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover." Metropolitan Police spokesperson

The rents are scandalous: they only want rich people to live in this city, no one else. It’s for tourists. They’re cleaning the graffiti! There were some that were really beautiful, no other city in the world had graffiti like Barcelona’s. But just try to explain to those brutes what art is. The fuck. They ruin everything.” “A friend of ours was arrested because he painted a slogan that said, ‘Tourists, you’re the terrorists.’ They gave him like four months. Poor guy,” said Julieta.

Art like that doesn’t need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it’s saying without words being spoken. ~Ed

Like a handprint in cement An indelible mark has been left My identity has been bent At the point where your fingers pressed. Some people leave their marks All over your identity; Some leave beautiful art And others graffiti obscenities.

Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincushion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a graffiti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubble. Fragile laws were shattered without effort or intent and the cops considered false arrest a moral duty. Integrity was no more than a fierce dream. Crime was the new and only art form. The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting. Anyone trying to adapt was persecuted. One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child. Other denizens were bomb zombies, pocketing grenades and wandering gaunt and vacant for days before winding down and pulling the pin on themselves. There was no beach under the sidewalk. Yet in dealing with this environment the one strategy common to all was the assumption that it could be dealt with.

Growing up in NYC,The broken sidewalks, graffiti filled subways, and humid Laundromats, did not offer solace. I found solace in the strings of my violin, in my ballet slippers at the studio, and while gazing at frescoes in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was always in the Arts that my soul was replenished.

Longtemps, un bâtiment a symbolisé la face underground arty du Queens : le 5 Pointz Aerosol Art Center. Un immense entrepôt accueillant plus de 200 ateliers d'artiste et recouvert de graffitis, devenu la Mecque des amateurs de street art. 5 Pointz, nommé ainsi pour symboliser l'épicentre des cinq quartiers de New York, a pour voisin célèbre l'annexe du MoMA, le PS1, qui propose des expositions souvent plus audacieuses que le grand frère de Manhattan.

Rauschenberg. Yet most startling was the fusion of people from the club scene, the art scene, the graffiti scene—three or four thousand in a party atmosphere. “I had girls serving Coca-Cola in little bottles, because

the radical inventions like public art and graffiti. When we think of the eighties, we think more about the music than the art in popular culture. We think about Madonna. Keith and Jean were right there with Madonna, Bowie, Eno. That may be the core of the eighties. I

You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.

Graffiti is the art of the people. It is a language without clear official status, but whose instinctive quality testifies to the honesty of human experience and the true nobility of art. Often marked with a sense of eroticism and violence, the wall conserves something pure and sacred about the human story.

The first time I picked up James Baldwin, I finally saw myself. It occurred to me that I could be an activist from my own source of power—words. It can only make our journey toward justice more robust, more beautiful, when we offer a diversity of paths, a more expansive vision of action. This is not new. This is Detour and Hiero Veiga's graffiti art resurrecting Black faces slain by the police. This is Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry creating collective sleeping experiences to reclaim the justice and liberation in rest. This is even, to some degree, some of the words you'll find in this book. Written in holy defiance of what is, and in imagination of what should be. If writing is a calling, I have a responsibility to demand justice in my writing as much as in the streets. When we expand our imaginations for activism, we enter into practices of lament and rage with more particularity, and we begin to realize more nuanced paths to justice.

Caravaggio was a murderer. Cellini murdered multiple people and the local villagers let him go unpunished because they were such admirers of his art. Banksy today is greatly admired, and yet he’s truly little more than a criminal.” “If you don’t see the difference between putting graffiti on a building and slaughtering families, then you’ve crossed into a place I can’t follow.” “I’m simply saying that great art occasionally comes from great insanity.

Existence becomes the game and the game becomes art. As it is in life.

Graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Despite having to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually the most honest artform available.