Bob Colacello Quotes

When a collector says, "You've got to educate me," or "What's a good investment?" then I don't know what to say. I have no idea. Let's face it, I'm probably going to recommend artists that I represent.

I started out making $4 for my first fight, but imagine paying $25,000 for a painting...look at me!

Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.

A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

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.

The '80s market was only a Japanese market. It was the Japanese outbidding each other for the most expensive works of art. When the Japanese economy went down the tubes, there was no one left to pay the prices that have been recorded for all of those works.

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business.

My work rarely comes up in secondary market, so it means that my prices stay low.

No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.

Galleries, and they're all the same, and rightly so, they sell work.

The art world is a bit smaller than the music world, and the music world is a bit smaller than the cinema world. But the art world is pretty tight even though the biggest thing that's happened to it is the auctions, which are the only reason people on the outside know anything about it.

When I was setting out to be an artist, I said: If I can just produce one work that some people think is good, if I can become an obscure cult artist, that's all I want. Well, I attained that. I'm an obscure cult artist, and I think now, Why didn't I say I want to be another Picasso or something? What other options were open to me? But I was convinced I couldn't achieve great things because I don't have a steady-state mind.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

I met Picasso when I was a kid. I turned one of his drawings down which would be worth £37 million now. My dad wouldn't talk to me for a fortnight.

A work of art is worth what someone will pay for it.

Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.

In the art world, Monet means money.

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

I never expected to sell my art. It wasn't like today where you come out of art school and they promise you a future. Now it's almost regulated in a way. When we came out of school, we just wanted to make art that'd blow your hair back and do it for sport. There was no commercial possibility that we saw.

If you look at the size of the art world in terms of the money that is being transacted compared to other parts of the 'consciousness industry,' it is minuscule. But if you look at what happens in this small sector, how it rubs off on the rest of it, it is astonishing.

There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art.