Eric Drooker Quotes

I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.

When I was in my early twenties I was doing tenant organizing - rent strikes, specifically - in my building. I think that was how I started doing poster art. It was something very concrete.

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.

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.

Illustrators are usually illustrating something big or commercial if not outright advertising. It's a form of prostitution, but that's cool because we don't have any moral hang-up about it.

I don't even believe in magic, or ghosts or anything like that, and yet in a city like New York, on the subway, I definitely see ghosts and art seems to have some magical properties.

The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.

The problem with prostitution in my experience is that it's often unsatisfying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Americans didn't really have any experience with something as basic as "community."

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.

Working people are working even longer hours, even though we won the eight-hour workday at the Haymarket General Strike in Chicago.

There's the fact that animation is extremely time-consuming, tedious, labor-intensive, and therefore, extremely expensive as an art form to really do it right, to really do full animation.

We all know artists who like to collaborate, who like to work as a team. It all kind of depends what your habitual working method is.

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.

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%.

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are.

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.

Street posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.

Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.

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.

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

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.