“A lot of people have this idea of art as being this sort of pure thing that happens to gifted people that have a different kind of imagination from the rest of society. Those people also love to project the idea of pure motivation on those artists and so if they do anything to try and sell it, that sort of muddies the waters and makes it less pure. in order to be the most powerful political artist or artist in general you have to be able to make a living from making your art so you can dedicate all your time to it.
For me, it even goes beyond that. In having a commercial side to what I do, well beyond just having to make a living it goes to capitalism being the language that Americans most speak and understand. So, if something is valuable to people then they want to acquire it and they’ll spend money to do it. (…) I immediately said this has to effect people that normally don’t engage with art. It needs to work commercially because that means its effected those people.”

“The States had this humongous street art boom that was like totally different, all the writers hated it and it was a pretty big deal. I’ve seen a lot of it going on here [in Melbourne], I’ve snapped a lot of pictures of street art just ragged. We went through a lot of that, but I think when you get into your thirties and older if you want to continue to do this stuff and push the envelope, then you need to expand your vision and learn from what happened with street art. These guys came in and they were being really effective on a different level, it opened up a lot of doors in a weird way. And now as street art is kind of dying off, the original wave of it at least, you’ve got a lot of writers who have adopted a lot of stuff and decided to blur the lines. In my opinion saying “Well graffiti is this way, and it has these rules” is contradictory, you’re supposed to break rules doing graffiti. That’s how it originated, and it’s our job especially to be semi-intelligent and start putting that original lawlessness back into it and push it to a new realm.”