Damien Hirst Quotes

I hate art auctions.

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.

I love to collect modern art.

I'm saving up to buy art. Nothing famous, but every time I'm in a new city I wander into galleries and dream about buying great pieces one day.

I knew I could get a better price without calling for bids

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

In the art world, Monet means 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.

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 mum is a big collector of art.

Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.

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

I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

I collect a lot of art.

I don't see myself as a great discoverer of artists, like Charles Saatchi.

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.

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

Despite all the efforts of art dealers, the number of Rembrandts existing at a given time is limited; yet such paintings are commonly disposed of by auction.

I'm an art collector, have been for years, and I paint. Needless to say, the artwork in my houses, apartment is extensive.

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.

Practice negotiating, and hone your style and skills with low-consequence transactions. Call the phone company and threaten to switch providers if they won't give you a better deal on your service going forward. Go to a boutique and ask for a discount.

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.

If you're going to play the bargaining game, you just need to make the other side mad. You want them to get a little annoyed. Then you know that you've come in with a good price.

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.