Larry Gagosian Quotes

The '80s market was only a Japanese market. It was the Japanese outbidding each other for the most expensive works of art. When the Japanese economy went down the tubes, there was no one left to pay the prices that have been recorded for all of those works.

It's a mystery to me the way that contemporary art galleries function.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Galleries, and they're all the same, and rightly so, they sell work.

I think the problem with the art market and the art scene is that it is its own beast. It thrives and breathes and defecates independently of the artist.

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

I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000...' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by.

Buying art is not understanding 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.

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 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.

My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

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.

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

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

Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

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

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.

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.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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

I've never been what they call a 'pure gallerist.' I find that somewhat pretentious, honestly - I'm an art dealer. I like to show great artists of our time, but I also like dealing. And I think they reinforce each other.

I love art, but I've never bought an artwork or even considered it.