Waldemar Januszczak Quotes

When I started writing about art, there were no curators.

The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there's pressure to.

New York is more where art is bought than where art is made.

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

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

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 New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren't hard to find.

I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture.

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

Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.

I used to live in New York, and I know a number of people who have friends who work at galleries. I spent time hanging out with them, going to openings. It was a good way to do research, to hang out and to look at the art that was present.

I don't think the art market is for everybody. Yeah, of course we have a global gallery. But we're like the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-tenth. OK? Not just who's buying but who's really seriously engaged with art.

I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

Miami's my favorite art fair. I even surfed there one year.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.

Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

In 1983, I was working at an art gallery in Los Angeles and going to film school at Los Angeles City College. At that time, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young painter and was visiting L.A. for his first show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery.