Art Aesthetics Quotes

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.

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

It is wonderful how much depends upon the relations of black and white A black and white, if properly balanced, suggests colour.

I've always wanted to make Australian art interesting. To get a different audience watching art documentaries would be great.

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

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.

If you were going through your attic and found a Van Gogh, what would you do? You wouldn't put it in your bathroom; you'd want to share it with the world because you know people will love it.

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.

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 is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake - they've always been there - but the pirates who've taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.

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.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

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.

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

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.

My dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art.

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