Education Quote by Bill Griffith

There’s a sly self-demotion baked into Griffith’s “Fine Art, if that’s what you’d call it,” and it’s doing more than modesty. It’s a little jab at the art-world hierarchy he was trained to worship: eight years of painting in New York, the implied grind of studios and critiques and gallery dreams, reduced to a shrug once another medium reveals itself as more alive. That parenthetical is the tell. He’s not just questioning his own work; he’s questioning the whole credentialed pipeline that labels some images “art” and others “comics,” as if the difference were moral rather than cultural.

The sentence turns on a pivot of place and publication: from “art school in Brooklyn” and “New York” as an institution to the East Village Other as an ignition point. The specificity matters. East Village Other wasn’t a museum; it was counterculture print, cheap paper, fast circulation, a forum where drawing could be political, vulgar, immediate, communal. Griffith frames the encounter as an epiphany because underground comix offered a permission structure painting often withheld: you could be personal, angry, funny, and formally inventive without waiting for gatekeepers to declare you serious.

Under the nostalgia is a quiet argument about legitimacy. Griffith isn’t romanticizing failure; he’s narrating escape - from a prestige economy into an audience economy. The intent is origin-story, but the subtext is critique: the “fine” in Fine Art can be a velvet rope, and a comic can be a crowbar.