Latest Eric Drooker Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Eric Drooker

  Art, Way, Art Is

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Source: www.guernicamag.com