Tuesday, June 15, 2010

contemporary art in quotes

I find that these quotes do a better job getting to the real foundation of what is going on in today's contemporary art world more than any book, article, or paper I read recently.


Art should chase life while the art world chases money; if you start chasing money with art the whole thing is fucked.

- Damien Hirst


Art prices are determined by the meeting of real or induced scarcity with pure, irrational desire, and nothing is more manipulable than desire...A fair price is the highest one a collector can be induced to pay.

- Robert Hughes


Art dealers are like surfboard riders.
You can't make a wave.
If there aren't waves out there, you're dead.
But the good surfboard riders can sense which of
the waves coming in will be the good one,
the one that will last. Successful art dealers
have a feeling for hitting the right wave.

- Andre Emmerich


Bernard Berenson [the critic] said to Bauer the antique dealer:
"A man as scholarly as yourself shouldn't be a dealer, it's horrible to be a dealer." To which Bauer replied,
"Between you and me there's no difference; I'm an intellectual dealer and you're a dealing intellectual."

- Rene Gimpel


On art dealers:
We act as a sort of broker trying to represent the desires of artists and the needs of private collectors and museums.

- Brent Sikkema


Art tells you things you don't know you need to know until you know them.

- Peter Schjeldahl


It is a great paradox of our times that visual culture should be vanishing even as the art market soars.
Abstract concepts take precedence over what the eye sees.
Artists' names matter even more, and the art to which they are attached ever less.

- Souren Melikian


There are no rules about investment.
Sharks can be good. Artists' dung can be good.
Oil on canvas can be good. There's a squad of conservators out there to look after anything an artist decides is art.

- Charles Saatchi


Money complicates everything. I have a genuine belief that art is a more powerful currency than money - that's the romantic feeling that an artist has.
But you start to have this sneaking feeling that money is more powerful.

- Damien Hirst


The museum has largely supplanted the church as the emblematic focus of the American city.

- Robert Hughes


No comments:

Post a Comment