Elizabeth Taylor is one of the great cultural icons. She is a part of our history and should be celebrated.… This presentation is very special for the community, there are so many people who want to understand this side of Elizabeth Taylor.
I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art.
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.
Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.
Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.
Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business.
In the 1970s when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show. It never would have happened.
When skateboarding and punk merged, it really became a large teen subculture.
Part of my agenda has been to support art that engages life with people.
Dennis Hopper is one of the great American lives.
Overall, I think any opportunity to expose people to art on a mass level - to have some kid in Oklahoma say to his mother, "I want to be an artist" - is a good thing.
I was a fan of Andy's since I was a small kid. I recall seeing an ad of famous people on an airplane together. It was caricature drawing. There was Muhammad Ali, there was Miles Davis, and there was Andy Warhol. I had a fascination with him since I was little.
One of the interesting things about skateboarding and graffiti is that skateboarding exists in the documentation of an act.
I didn't know how to run a business. I was a terrible gallerist, the worst in history, possibly.
Ramp skating has become the most popular televised form of skating because they can constrain it. They can judge it based on what's happening within this box of a ramp.
We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular - popular culture.
When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith.
To be in Brazil and see the work of Os Gêmeos or to be in England and see what Banksy is doing is pretty fascinating to me.
I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.
Skateboarding, like graffiti, will never be tamed. No matter how much they monetize it, no matter how big it gets, no matter how many companies are putting millions and millions of dollars into marketing it, it's always going to be some Mexican kid on a corner in Echo Park that changes the rules of the game.
When you go out skating with your friends, you need one friend who knows how to take a good picture. Without the picture, there is no proof that you pulled the trick.
Street skating, which is what I grew up with, is completely free of rules. You can do anything. When I see a skater go by, I think, What is this person going to do here? It's the same with people who write, who make music, who draw, who make movies. Creative people tend to have all of those different avenues in them.
Sometimes you do a sound installation, and the first day or two it is very exciting. Then you are hearing this every day for a month, and it becomes like a torture.
Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.
I want to use whatever connections to get a super-outstanding Basquiat in the White House. It could be one of mine. It could be something that a friend owns.
