Urban Art Quotes

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

I never called myself an urban artist, but that's what I was classed as, and I almost tried to live up to the name instead of who I really was.

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.

Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

Most people think I do street art, so I do everything for nothing. I'm an urchin who paints walls and does work for nothing. That's the first misconception about street artists, that we just paint for nothing.

I was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.

I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.

I think hip hop is a dance music that's rebellious by nature.

I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.

Often the art in New York is related to the buildings, to grandiose things.

There seems to be art and creativity everywhere, whether it was in the galleries of Jaffa or along the streets of Jerusalem ... the creativity blows my mind because you can see that people want to live their lives to the fullest.

The best art is on the street.

Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.

The type of work I do, which is often called 'Pop Surrealism,' is very separate from Gagosian and Mary Boone type of gallery art.

In 1964, when we first arrived in New York City, I remember vividly seeing the skyline of Manhattan, and our first proposal of 1964 was to wrap two lower Manhattan buildings. We never got permission.

People underestimate hip-hop the way they have sometimes underestimated comic books.

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.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

I've become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital - no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We've come into our own, finally.

I love to paint and beautify the most unexpected of places - I've painted everything from doorways to trains but have always wanted to do something really huge and different.

I'm a Banksy fan. I'm also a fan of Chris Hobe, Mister Totem, Drew Wootten, Mad Clout, Hense and Sever, in visual and street art. And Jonathan Mannion and Shane Nash in photography.

The thing with sculpture is, 90% of the time, when I pass a piece of sculpture, it's in public or somewhere, and it's just, how inconvenient that that's there. It takes up so much room, and it's so oppressive.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.