Larry Gagosian Quotes

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

I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.

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.

Buying art is not understanding art.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

My mum is a big collector of art.

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.

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.

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.

People don't buy and sell art based on the personality of the artist. Or there wouldn't be much art bought and sold.

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.

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.

Eventually, most people felt MoMA had filled a very important gap.

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work.

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.

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.

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.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

I love art; I collect mostly modern art.

People who think about art as an investment are pathetic.

I've been collecting art for much of my adult life. I started around 1960. And my wife and I really enjoy art a great deal. We don't have a lot of money, so we have works on paper, but we enjoy them a great deal.

I love to collect modern art.

I collect a lot of art.