Georg Baselitz Quotes

The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

I'm going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, 'That's a huge idea.' Yeah, it's big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That's maybe a big gallery's total sales for a given year.

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.

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

My mission is not to forbid French art. If the quality is there, I buy; if the quality isn't there, I don't.

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.

Any critic will tell you that there are a few dealers where you get a little bit scared to go into their gallery, and that's unfair to them, to yourself, to the reader, and to the artist. But I just want to look. When I'm done looking and writing, I love talking to art dealers. They are so alive and interesting and amazing - from Larry Gagosian all the way on down.

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

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 started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.

My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.

When you're buying paintings, it feels grown up.

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

I collect a lot of art.

They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought.

Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.

I buy some art but I don't like to talk about it.

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.

My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, 'What would be the coolest is contemporary art - it will make me look young and interesting.' I'm more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.

I have a lot of art in the house, but it's mine, friends'. Not necessarily - like, I didn't spend thousands of dollars to attain it. It's authentic, at least.

I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation.

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.

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 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.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.