Top 83 Quotes About Street Art
#1. It is a significant symbol that street art is gaining increased attention and credibility in the art world and that's a good thing.
Invader
#2. I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
M.I.A.
#3. I like the illicit nature of street art, but I won't miss the opportunity to make a nice piece because it is legal.
Invader
#4. I think that street art is illegal and it has to stay illegal.
Invader
#5. Melbourne, where I grew up, is one of the street art capitals of the world. Something about discovering freshly painted walls always fills me with optimism; it's autonomous and democratic, and reminds me that maybe people are paying attention after all.
Penelope Mitchell
#6. A lot of people thought I got famous as a studio artist, then decided to cash in on it. But it actually was just a matter of survival for many years, and I felt it was really important for me to be able to say whatever I wanted with my street art and fine art.
Shepard Fairey
#7. In Afghanistan I was doing street art because it was more open, but when I had a show, only men would come. I said, I'm an artist not only for men, but for women too. So that's why I like graffiti.
Malina Suliman
#8. 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
#9. I hate the idea of street art. With music, I just needed my brain and my voice, which didn't cost anything.
M.I.A.
#10. This is the Detroit I want to write about," he says, feeling urbane as fuck. "Tattoo seances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don't even know this is happening."
"Of course we know it's happening, shithead," Anorexic Thor says. "You don't know it's happening.
Lauren Beukes
#11. The Internet wasn't even an option for me, so one of the reasons I was so motivated to do street art was because there was no other outlet. Maybe if the Internet had been around then, I would have tried to do stuff that went viral and was clever and got me a lot of hits.
Shepard Fairey
#12. I'd been just like her, a youngster with something to say, a rebel through street art, leaving my mark on public buildings, to taunt the government and humor the public
Kenya Wright
#13. The Internet doesn't always play a great role for art, especially art in the street, as people take what they see for the final image of it. But the most interesting thing about street art is to see it for real, to understand what it means and where it's displayed.
JR
#14. I don't have this obsessive need to do street art all the time because it's already opened doors for me.
Shepard Fairey
#15. That's the test of street art - to see if anybody stopped. People would cross out ones they didn't like and would star others. I liked that people would engage with them.
Jenny Holzer
#16. As soon as street art got popular, I was just like, 'I'm out of here.'
Barry McGee
#17. I have always been a Peter Blake fan and love street art and graffiti. I really like this street-art collective called Faile. They're from Brooklyn and make these prints of beautiful women.
Eliza Doolittle
#18. I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.
Banksy
#19. 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
#20. For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.
Billy Al Bengston
#21. If you're a new artist, practice your art and share it. Set up shop somewhere, whether it's a street corner or a coffee shop. I got my start in a coffee shop that didn't even have live music. I wanted to play in coffee shops that did have live music, but I didn't have an audience.
Jason Mraz
#22. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
Joel Meyerowitz
#23. In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#24. Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
Who shall become a master of art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#25. 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
#26. Friday's "Working Lunch" is at The Avenue on St James's Street. It's a bit like eating in an art installation, a White-Out affair that tries for a So-Serious NYC feel, but is occupied by Daddy's Girls wearing pashmina's and too many Pin Stripes worn by too many people called Hugo.
Simon Pont
#27. If the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living.
Fernando Pessoa
#28. Imagine you saw a colour in your dream, which you have never seen before. It doesn't consist of any colours or shades that you know. Trying to describe that colour would be as difficult as trying to belive that there is enough love & compassion in the world so every human can feel happiness.
Egor Kraft
#29. 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.
John Leguizamo
#30. Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.
Al Stewart
#31. Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.
Aristotle.
#32. People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish ... but that's only if it's done properly.
Banksy
#33. We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use our taxes to support street theatre in order to oppose street gangs. We should have a well-supported regional theatre in order to oppose regionalism and.
Maya Angelou
#34. The thought for us [street photographers] was always: How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant? And, Could we really make it live as art? There was an almost moral dimension.
Joel Meyerowitz
#35. But once you've learned the nasty, street-fighting, no-holds-barred art of Max Kwon Do, you never really forget
James Patterson
#37. I don't have a favorite place to see art. I like to encounter it anywhere, museum, gallery, home, studio, street ... I do prefer to see good art, when I see art, but it doesn't matter where I see it.
James Nares
#38. A walk down 14th street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art.
Allan Kaprow
#39. Part of what I do and what I want to do is I want to bring art into the everyday life. If you can take ordinary just walking in the street and you're confronted by something, that might change your day - it might inspire you.
Kenny Scharf
#40. When you walk down the street and see something in a crazy spot, there's something powerful about that. The street will always be an important part of getting art out there for me.
Shepard Fairey
#41. As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.
Hari Kunzru
#42. Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.
Thomas Leuthard
#43. Interfacing street sculpture in public space creates an installation environment that turns regular space into art space. Signs and people and everything around a street sculpture-they all become part of it. A two-dimensional work, being confined to surfaces, doesn't have as much of a capacity.
Mark Jenkins
#44. The real art is in the street, is making the artwork, and for that you have to involve people. The action is actually the artwork.
JR
#45. We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Tom McDonough
#46. No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
Alice Sebold
#47. Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art.
Jennifer Baumgardner
#48. When I was council president I had a rule that people could sleep on the job. I modified the rule. You could actually sleep in public if you weren't sitting down. I had three people who actually perfected the art of sleeping while standing.
John F. Street
#49. I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.
Alex Webb
#50. I always like to see if the art across the street is better than mine.
Andy Warhol
#51. I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy.
Philippe Petit
#53. 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
#54. I like the idea that you can paint something outdoors, and anyone can see it. It's open to anyone, and people have to deal with it. In the gallery, it's the same 150 people on the San Francisco art scene. There's a dynamic on the street that's definitely more interesting.
Barry McGee
#55. Warren Street was at the high end of the New Romantic scene. They were mostly college art students and people who knew top designers.
Boy George
#56. The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York.
Kim Gordon
#57. Nas' Illmatic blew my mind when I first heard it. The poetry was done on such a high level that in a way, it validated our existence, our culture. He used the language of the street at the time and made it art. Art tends to be validating.
Erik Parker
#58. 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.
Raymond Salvatore Harmon
#59. I'm a street fighter. I'm ready for any kind of mixed martial arts that comes at me.
Ricardo Mayorga
#60. Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.
John Sununu
#61. Pimping is an art, Whoreson. There are very few pimps in this world who can really take the title of being a pimp. Just because a man gets his money from a whore, that don't make him no true pimp. Real pimps are really rare.
Donald Goines
#63. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
Antony Gormley
#64. O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
Jonathan Swift
#65. So I find every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#66. In my gap year between college and drama school, I taught art at a hospice and worked at a little coffee shop across the street from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London when everything around it was still a construction zone.
Juliet Rylance
#67. Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.
Invader
#68. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#69. When I did '21 Jump Street,' I felt like I was a part of something great, but on a very large scale. Working with people that genuinely want to make good art or good work or a good film, that's what keeps me going.
Spencer Boldman
#70. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.
Vivian Swift
#71. Spend more time in a Jiu Jitsu gi than in street clothes.
Ryron Gracie
#72. In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.
Peter Hedges
#73. Traveling to the Middle East and playing music for people on the street, for soldiers, for people in hospitals, and for people who lost their homes, and seeing people open up through the experience of music really restored my faith in music, in art, and in culture to change things.
Michael Franti
#74. Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.
Jerry Saltz
#75. I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
Claes Oldenburg
#76. The art of investing is not about figuring out what has already happened. It's about anticipating the futureand creating the future that others will read about in The Wall Street Journal.
Joshua Rogers
#77. I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.
Colleen Atwood
#78. I live in Brooklyn, New York. It is a melting pot of cultures and people. I walk down the street, and there is art on the buildings and people congregating who have been neighbors for years and events and music and freedom.
Erin Willett
#79. Gay people represent art. Start allowing gay people to be beaten in the street then you allow art to be beaten in the street. History has taught us where that leads.
Robert Black
#80. I tried the line out on some people on the street, like, "What do you think of this: 'the art of family life is to not take it personally'?" And they would laugh. But you know, everybody's got something going on in their families, and then once you have kids, that of course exponentially rises.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#81. Believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, - that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite
Friedrich Nietzsche
#82. That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.
M.I.A.
#83. To understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to understand artists. Art is freedom - freedom of expression - and its message has resonated through society for centuries.
Peter M. Brant
