Robert Del Naja Quotes

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 think it's probably the Dutch who are to blame for starting the whole 'art business', because before they came along, art was attached to relatively stable structures, and it was everybody's. It was like going to the movies.

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

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.

People don't buy and sell art based on the personality of the artist. Or there wouldn't be much art bought and sold.

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

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

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

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.

New York is more where art is bought than where art is made.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.

I don't think the art market is for everybody. Yeah, of course we have a global gallery. But we're like the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-tenth. OK? Not just who's buying but who's really seriously engaged with art.

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.

I would love to collect art at some point, but I think the whole rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny.

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.

Buying art is not understanding art.

People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.

I'd like to work with Damien Hirst.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

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