You won’t get a glimpse of the mustache.

You may know him by affectionate monikers like “The Sultan of Sleaze,” or as the director of weird and warped feature films like Crybaby, Hairspray and Pink Flamingoes. Unbeknownst to some, John Waters is also a visual artist who’s had over fifty solo exhibitions around the world. Film culture references often pop up in his photography, sculpture, and installation work, and he uses them to talk about gender, consumerism, queerness, and other Waters-y stuff.

But the Prince of Puke sometimes feels like the art world scrutinizes him for his celebrity filmmaker status, and that his reputation gets in the way of him being taken seriously as a fine artist. Self Portrait #3 is his response, in which he literally defaces himself by obscuring his own headshots with pushpins, rubber roaches, whiteout, and rubber stamps that read “overexposed.” Making himself unrecognizable in his own artwork is a real sweet way to say “screw the haters.”

Waters seems to be a firm believer in art’s ability to zealously eff sh*t up. “I think that contemporary art’s job is always to wreck things but to wreck them with good spirit,” he says. He also enjoys art writing “because it offends regular people and keeps them away.” The misanthropy is more cheerful than antagonistic, which is characteristic for a guy who’s spent decades making art that gleefully butts against any semblance of respectability.