Eric Drooker Quotes

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

Eric Drooker

Art, Way, Art Is

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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

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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

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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, Thinking

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If you make a street poster and literally paste it on the street in a city like New York, where it's such a mixed population and so densely populated, and it stays up for a full week and doesn't get covered up by something else or pulled down, you will have fifty thousand people who will have seen it. It will be the poorest of the poor - some homeless man who lives on the street will see it and probably appreciate it, or some businessman or landlord will see it. Everyone will see it. And whether or not they even realize that they saw it, on some level it's affecting their consciousness.

Eric Drooker

New York, Men, Covered Up

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The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.

Eric Drooker

Art, Museums, Clients

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Most visual artists, just like most writers, tend to be solitary. While they're doing the art, that is. They may have a crazy orgy that morning, but at a certain point they kick everybody out, and say: "Come, go home. Yeah, I had a great time too." And then you're alone again, and then you're freshly inspired and energized.

Eric Drooker

Art, Morning, Crazy

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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

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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.

Eric Drooker

Artist, Cracks, Culture

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Eric Drooker

Moral, Advertising, Form

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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

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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

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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.

Eric Drooker

Art, Thinking, Twenties

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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

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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

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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

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

Eric Drooker

Art, Mean, People

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

Eric Drooker

Community

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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

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Latest quotes from interviews

"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,

www.guernicamag.com, added Nov 14, 2017

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