Brian Blessed Quotes

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.

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.

A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything.

In the art world, Monet means money.

I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm still around artists. I don't have anymore wall space. And I don't have the money to collect anymore, the prices are outrageous.

I got a house full of Rembrandts and priceless art, and all the little girls they wanna tear me apart.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

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 did work at Christie's for a couple of weeks, getting ready for 'The Devil Wears Prada,' getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art, and everybody was really nice. It was great.

Never buy four C-plus paintings when you can buy one A.

It's a great advantage to be able to play people off against each other, isn't it? You go to Christie's and get a quote on something. And then you go to Phillips' and you tell them what Christie's has given you. I like auctions for artists.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

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

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.

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.

Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.

Most collectors I know don't think of art as a business or as an investment.