Art & Creativity Quote by Joey Skaggs

"My art became very public" lands like a dry confession from someone who knows exactly how porous the border is between performance and publicity. Joey Skaggs isn’t talking about gallery walls; he’s talking about the street, the camera, the news cycle. As a hoax artist and media prankster, Skaggs built work that only fully exists once it’s been mistaken for reality and circulated as fact. The line is a quiet flex: the medium isn’t paint or film, it’s attention.

The phrasing matters. "Became" frames the exposure as evolution, not strategy, as if the work naturally outgrew private space and wandered into the commons. That soft passivity is the tell. Skaggs made art that weaponizes the public sphere, using journalists and audiences as unwitting collaborators. The subtext is less "I got famous" than "I learned how to make systems reveal themselves."

Calling it "my art" also insists on authorship in a domain that loves to deny it. Public spectacle is usually treated as noise, marketing, or scandal. Skaggs claims it as craft, which forces an uncomfortable question: if a stunt exposes gullibility, hypocrisy, or institutional laziness, does its legitimacy depend on being labeled art - or does the label just make the manipulation easier to swallow?

Contextually, it reads as a summary of late-20th-century media reality: once mass attention became a kind of currency, the public itself turned into a canvas. Skaggs’ line captures that shift with a shrug, like someone describing the weather while pointing at the storm he helped engineer.