Alternative Art Quotes

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

My films are completely offbeat.

Although you might have to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually one of the more honest art forms available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.

Rock n' roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn't a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.

When I came into improv, it was almost like an outsider art form.

And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.

When artists who are not associated with the typical infrastructure get recognition, that becomes a cultural movement.

I'm always trying to bring unusual content to a different audience - a non-art-world audience.

When museums are left with so little money that their future is in the hands of private donors, then they are unable to develop their own signatures by collecting themselves. On the other hand, though, I think we should also celebrate the fact that there is a lot of art that lives outside of, or on the outskirts of, the art market - and it is doing quite well.

I hadn't done a photo cover in a while, and I decided to do a take on the 'Pin Ups' cover, but do it in skull face and have the girl in skull face. People seem to dig it.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

I like money but I love performance art and it goes hand in hand. I'm not the 'Titanic,' I'm 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.' I'm not a blockbuster, I'm a cult classic. I think my strong but cult-like fanbase expects me to challenge norms.

I've never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for -- civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don't care about -- dark-and-weird-but-fun -- and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me!

Sometimes I get gigs in weird, artsy places because weird, artsy people embraced my public-access show, which I could only have done in the way I did in New York.

I've thought of becoming a photographer! To save my talent as a writer.

I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash.

I wanna make weird stuff.

Sure, 'Twilight' is really huge right now and everybody's freaking out over it, but it will go away soon and I will be back to doing what I'm used to doing: weird little movies that nobody sees.

I didn't have any interest in traditional art.

I just try to keep myself a traditionalist. I liked being an underground comic doing my thing. I want to maintain that. I just do.

I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

I created a successful outdoor youth festival - the Liverd festival - against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.