Jerry Saltz Quotes

Buying art is not understanding art.

Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000...' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by.

Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

The art world is never going to be popular like the NFL, but more people are buying art and I think that's cushioning, to a great extent, our art-market cycles.

Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.

I really just started buying art as a passion. I never considered it an investment, but it ended up being a good investment.

To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.

People who think about art as an investment are pathetic.

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art. I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art.

I don't believe in selling art by transparencies. Art is a firsthand experience.

The art market is global now, and there's becoming more of an international consensus about what constitutes good art.

By the time I discovered Chicano painters in the mid-'80s, I recognized that these guys were really world-class painters, but they weren't getting any attention, which was good in one sense in that I could get their work for cheaper!

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway.

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.

Nobody really needs a painting. It's something you kind of create value for in a way that you don't with a company. It's an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.

I've never been what they call a 'pure gallerist.' I find that somewhat pretentious, honestly - I'm an art dealer. I like to show great artists of our time, but I also like dealing. And I think they reinforce each other.

I think the problem with the art market and the art scene is that it is its own beast. It thrives and breathes and defecates independently of the artist.

I love art, but I've never bought an artwork or even considered it.