Eric Drooker quotes:

Poster art was always my way of being involved in the conversation. So it wasn't just a one-way conversation with the police yelling at us or freaking us out. Street posters allowed you to have the last word.

The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The art was just a way of hooking people in, saying: "Hey, maybe there's something cool about the tenant meeting. If the picture's really cool and weird, maybe I should check this out." And I think all of my art has really developed out of that realization.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.

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%.

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.

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.

I try to, at least once or twice a week, have someone over and model, usually a dancer friend or a poet or someone to come over and just stay still for me. Depending on how exhibitionist they are, it will determine the finished work. And I say, "You're the muse; you come up with it. I'll draw you however you want."

I'm accustomed to just working by myself, alone in the room and cranking up the music and just working and getting all into an obsessive state where I'm focused on this thing, and it's the one thing that I feel like I may have a little bit of control over in my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... 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.

Sometime when I was in my mid-twenties I noticed, "Hey, even I don't go into too many art galleries. Why? Because I don't like the vibe in them. If even I'm not going into galleries, then who goes into art galleries in the first place?" It's just a certain, very narrow percentage of the population.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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