The John Waters SVA Commencement Speech of 2020
A transcript of the School of Visual Arts 2020 commencement speech.
The following is a transcript of John Waters’ commencement speech at School of Visual Arts in 2020.
Due to the so-called “pandemic,” it was live-streamed on May 28th, 2020.
The original video can be viewed, here.
John Waters:
Thank you all very much. Thank you.
I wanted to give this speech live at Radio City Music Hall as scheduled in front of the 5,000 graduates faculty and family members. But oh no! Here I am in front of a green screen in Baltimore, like some low rent, special effect, nutty professor.
Now you have to watch me virtually with no timing for laughs. And once posted, I'll be subject to being rewound, or worse yet fast forwarded.
Suppose hacker trolls interrupt our online ceremony today, yelling “Quit school!,” or “Free the test cheater Lori Loughlin!” There's nothing we could do about it. We're trapped in a grade Z horror movie with no way out.
Okay, I'm supposed to energize. That's a challenge when every morning you look at the headlines and they all basically say “you are going to die today.”
But I'm an optimist and you should be too.
If you do die tomorrow, at least you got your college degree, right? And suppose the end of the world is happening right now. Well, you won't miss a thing, will you? Because there will no more things. You'll be the last graduating class in the world! Now that's what I call unique!
Me? I've just been lying around at home, paranoid about touching my face and looking forward to the first Tiger King porno knockoff. What a time!
I bet you never thought the New York Department of Health would issue guidelines recommending masturbation during the pandemic? And those masks? Oh god, so hot! Steaming up your glasses when you're trying to study! Muffling your voice in online classrooms! Protective face coverings threaten my whole identity by hiding my mustache. But I wear these masks anyway for the safety of the prisoners whose bail I've recently helped contribute to through various charities.
I bet a few of these criminals are robbing your parents' cars. …I speak gloves.
Yeah, we have 'em on.
But don't they make you feel like Jack the Ripper, or worse yet, an unemployed proctologist? It's not pretty. But who wants cooties? Not me, and certainly not you; the smart ones about to get a degree!
…But now you have been robbed of a normal graduation, forever branded “the coronavirus class of 2020.” I wish I could be like a billionaire investor, who last year as commencement speaker pledged to pay off all the graduating students college loans!
I was gonna do the same until all show business got canceled and now I'm unemployed!
What would I have paid? Your speeding tickets, upcoming hair salon bills, all court ordered fines and of course, any outstanding medical marijuana dips! Okay, inspirational. You need to stop complaining. Onward, upward, as they say, positive, upward, as you'll never walk alone! Besides, your artists! And there were never any real jobs for you in the workplace anyway, were there? Even before the epidemic!
So what's with all the moaning? Artists are magicians! You can see what others cannot. Have a secret language. The power to make others follow. A dress code, all your own, and you can change history with one ludicrous idea! Plus, price fixing is legal in your field! Count your arty blessings and march on!
But what do you do if, God forbid, the art market dries up. Teaching jobs play hooky. Movie theaters don't reopen. Concert halls remain dark, and restaurant owners are condemned to a life of carryout.
You start over and embrace not working! Bumming around like starving artists used to do! Remember? Dirty clothes, hating success, refusing to sell out! Or, you create new career opportunities.
Before the virus, there used to be a job called “prison advocate,” where ex-cons taught rich people, sentenced to jail, how to serve their time. Martha Stewart had a prison advocate. So did Mary Boone. So why not create a new version? A poor advocate. Train the privileged how to do without. Tell fat cat art collectors, “If they can't buy an artwork, start dressing like one!” Be Jeff Koons’ puppy for a whole weekend, and see how close it will bring your family together.
Now that all charity bowls are canceled in New York City, what's a society lady supposed to do? She can still buy the latest designer originals, but you tell her to give them to the homeless instead. Once she saw how much a [unintelligible] or Yves Saint Laurent outfit would perk up a shelter, she might start a whole new charity for the fashion deprived.
Some casualties of the virus, I applaud. Celebrity culture? Good riddance! Who cares what stars do in quarantine? They do the same as you! They're bored. They get fat, they're over-medicated and out of a job. Yet fame has changed radically. Nurses are the new Marvel heroes who deserve our honorary degrees. Doctors have become reality stars in an unscripted battle as they graduate to a treatment. Amazon workers supermodels commencing down the runway of warehouses to deliver us toilet paper. Mail carriers and truck drivers? They are NFL Super Bowl champions, who every day score a diploma for just getting behind the wheel!
You are stars too! And today is your day to shine!
Degrees are like academy awards. You have to campaign, and sometimes the rules change. Fashion? Okay, a baccalaureate and this is ultra relevant, but let's hit the red carpet and take it to the Master's level by combining style with artistic nerve. Every day from now until November, start dressing head to toe as the candidate you're going to vote for to be president and vice president.
Think of the photo ops! Thousands of you know who Lookalikes and Joe Biden impersonators sitting next to Mike Pence drag kings and Amy Klobuchar or Elizabeth Warren drag queens, on the subway. It would bring us all together!
Yes, be an activist! But isn't everybody weary of both sides; left, right, even each other? Think of a whole new way to be radical.
Don't be violent, be funny! Climb over that border wall in El Paso and sneak into Mexico! “You're going the wrong way!,” illegal immigrants would shout. But you'd yell back, “No, we don't speak Spanish, we don't want jobs, we just wanna be in your country and chill!” Same thing with a “Make America Great” gang. Mock us, but be witty. “Flaunt, Win a Date with Mitch McConnell” contest at your rallies. Have a Nancy Pelosi Doppelganger dunk tank. “Send her back! Send her back!” You know who will be chanting that soon? Not Republicans! Your own parents when you tell them, “Because of the current economic situation, I'm thinking of moving back home with you permanently…”
“No, not that, never again!”
…Here's a good piece of advice. Learn to pick your own battles. The ones you can win! Are plastic straws really the biggest issue in America today? Should we go further and ban all plastic utensils and eat with our hands so cockroaches can live? I agree with PETA on some animal rights concerns, but when they argue that the term “pet” is derogatory to a dog and compare it to calling a woman “sweetie” or “honey,” well, I I'm not sure they win any converts. “Should the Boston Bomber be allowed to vote?” Give me a break! Let's make sure we can vote first!
Believe me, as you get older, some of your views will soften.
Things change. “Corona” used to be only a beer, remember? You learn to reboot yourself. Independent movie theaters? Turn them into drive-ins! Dust to Dawn, Greta Gerwig vegan snack bar! Hollywood? —Six feet away! Live action shoots are impossible! So all animation, all the time! Movie stars won't age! Facelifts will finally be a thing of the past!
You're never a revolutionary forever. In the sixties I wanted to burn the Bank of America down. And today, well, my money is deposited there. …Do I hear virtual booze? Oh, come on, you'll change too! Who knows? You embrace vinyl. Maybe the next hipster kids will revive talking on the telephone again and make you look uncool for refusing to do so. The cutting edge dulls with time. no matter how hard you try to keep up.
But while you're still young, maybe it's time to become a virus yourself. A good kind of virus. One fueled by the years of hard work you put in at the incubator known as the School of Visual Arts. An asymptomatic intellectual flu that stealthily infects the close-minded. Strikes those who judge others first but never themselves. You'll invade the cells of intolerance on both sides of a political fence. Damage systems of discrimination of any kind.
Yes, you will make others sick! Sick of sexual harassment, yet not sick of sexual acts themselves. Tired of transphobia, but awake to the freedom of gender confusion. You'll make both liberals and conservatives throat so dry they'll never be able to spew hate again.
But remember, you are sick too! You are a carrier. You must vomit out your last traces of racism left over from your ancestors. Sneeze out the toxic nationalism you've been force fed from politicians and cough up whatever elitism you've been lucky enough to inherit.
You must lose your taste for moral superiority and accept the fact that you can't smell your own smug virtuosity. Give yourself a fever. Raise your own temperature to high. “No, 98.6 for you.” No testing needed! You're not the new normal. You're the vaccine.
Artists burning up with an urgency for a counter-culture that once injected, refuses to be influenced by mine or any other generations.
Do it now; when nobody's looking, when nobody knows what is going to happen next.
You and only you will be held responsible. If we go back to the same old same old. Travel beyond the valley of the humor impaired and over the top of sexual anarchy to a coup d'état of crackpot capitalism.
Yes, capitalism.
We live in a capitalist country, don't we? But now it's only for the rich and the poor. Whoever thought fighting to bring back the middle class would be an extremist act?
...But it is!
Start the plague against noblesse oblige, so the doomsday of traditional solutions that didn't work can begin.
Artists, you are the cure too. The only people that can inspire the world to notice and then alter its destructive behavior. An assholeism apocalypse is just around the corner, but you have to light the first spark! The COVID-19 commandos! That's you!
Congratulations. And now it's time for action.
Thank you very much.
…
President Rhodes:
John Waters, the most suey generous, of suey generous artists. For your unequal nerve and centering the marginal, in conjuring what's barely in view. For five decades of diligence and urgency, pursuing and realizing your vision, creating and illuminating stars only you could see. For the force with which you ignore and trample aesthetic boundaries, leaving excitement and opportunity in your wake.
Finally, for your remarkable ability to disturb and delight simultaneously. For pushing forward, ceaselessly, making what would not be imagined without you. For all that you and your many works represent, on behalf of the faculty and the board of the School of Visual Arts, it is my pleasure to confer upon you our highest award, the Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.
John Waters:
Thank you President Rhodes! Thank you School of Visual Art for the recognition of my contribution to the arts. How amazing! My early movies were found obscene in court, received terrible reviews in the press, and American film festivals rejected them across the board. Yet artists were always in the audience for me! And that's all you need in life! The support of the lunatic artistic community!
I'm a doctor now because of you! Better yet, I get all the rights!
I can prescribe meds!
…privileges!
Do I now have tenure?
And “immunity there unto appertaining!?” Hear that police? I'm beyond the law! I'm a doctor of fine arts now. Just call me “Dr. Dirt,” and nothing better get in my way.
Thank you.
-pe
3-7-2025