Charles Saatchi Quotes

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

An uninspiring canvas becomes a glamorous masterpiece when it is reattributed to a better-known artist.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

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 go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.

It's in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it's difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you've been doing actually makes sense.

I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognized as such when it first appears.

All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.

I don't put a great deal of stock in art trophies.

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

My dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art.

Unless you are a born connoisseur of art, you will not be able to judge by yourself why certain art is superior to other art.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist's work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.