Jeffrey Deitch Quotes

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Well, I think there are artists who are more or less contemporary with Hopper who are more relevant.

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.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

The way you would know if someone is famous in the art world is that you would ask your mother. My mother knows who Picasso was. She knows who Warhol was.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

No artist is well served in thinking what will happen to their works. The best one can hope is that they'll enter the mainstream, and people will pull bits and pieces from them.

Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.

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.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

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

Unfortunately, the Egyptians weren't the greatest artists in the world.

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.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

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

The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It's the most radical thing.

Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.