Munira Mirza Quotes

Economics and art are strangers.

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

I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

Art-making is just another part of the consciousness industry.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

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!

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.

And you know, art as commerce, doesn't really make too much sense, they don't go together.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.

The arts are an integral part of the city's economic progress.

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.

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.

I don't believe in selling art by transparencies. Art is a firsthand experience.

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

The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence.

I think art maybe has just become very consumer-oriented, and maybe it's always been that way because it is a business.

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.

There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.

Art does, to some extent, follow economics.

I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate.

The artists are now big brands.

Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists.