Brian Blessed Quotes

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

Art can retain its value and even make you some money. If you have your iPhone on you - and you probably do - look for the artist's signature, and use that to look up the artist and get a sense of the piece's value before you buy it.

I love art; I collect mostly modern art.

My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

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 pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.

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.

If you were going through your attic and found a Van Gogh, what would you do? You wouldn't put it in your bathroom; you'd want to share it with the world because you know people will love it.

The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it'll be paraded round Sotheby's by people wearing white gloves.

No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.

25 years ago, when I started in New York, I had the pleasure to cook for Andy Warhol. At the time, I could have traded art for food - I should have done so, because I could get his work for nothing!

I'm very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

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

I collect a lot of art.

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

I'm an art collector, have been for years, and I paint. Needless to say, the artwork in my houses, apartment is extensive.

For me, all collecting must be done out of the love of the art. That being said, investment knowledge is absolutely mandatory so that you are really buying what you think you are buying.

I don't think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

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

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 haven't done much art shopping in Vegas. It tends to be from galleries that are London- or L.A.- or New York-based. We've never had someone standing over our shoulder telling us something is a good investment.

If you have the opportunity to have the best of the artist, then if you overpay, it doesn't matter. Eventually, the market will reward you. If it raises the value of our collection, we go for it.

I especially like to collect contemporary art.