Jeff Koons Quotes

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

I buy a lot of art. I buy Andy Warhols.

I'd like to work with Damien Hirst.

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!

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.

At the time that they were shown, the Brillo Boxes were underappreciated. It's only now, with the patina of history, that we can really see these masterpieces in a clear light.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

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

I love art; I collect mostly modern art.

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.

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 collect a lot of art.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners, the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture), the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog, and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism, idealism, and fantasy.

Well, I'd say that the beginning of this thing came through with Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's, where she opened this gallery and began showing some things that caused a little talk, amongst a lot of other things.

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

I probably have 15 to 20 Dalis in the store. The secret to buying Dali - never buy one made after 1970.

I was looking at the work of the New York street artists and then discovering Basquiat and Haring after that and seeing how the contemporary art scene was, and then going back into Warhol and all that was happening in the 60s.

I especially like to collect contemporary art.

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.

I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.

I hate when dealers talk to me. I love dealers - they're some of our favorite people in the art world. But I hate if they do a sales pitch on me. I can't stand it.

You only live once, buy Picassos whenever possible.

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

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