Art Appraisal Quotes

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

I did work at Christie's for a couple of weeks, getting ready for 'The Devil Wears Prada,' getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art, and everybody was really nice. It was great.

Believing that art is either worth a fortune or worth nothing at all.

It's a great advantage to be able to play people off against each other, isn't it? You go to Christie's and get a quote on something. And then you go to Phillips' and you tell them what Christie's has given you. I like auctions for artists.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

In the art world, Monet means money.

The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me.

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

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.

The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it'll be paraded round Sotheby's by people wearing white gloves.

A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.

I am astonished at the high prices paid for works by painters who are dead, prices none of them could expect when they were alive. It is a kind of tulip trade, in which living painters suffer but do not profit.

I don't know if there will ever be an ideal way of selling an original picture. Because everything you're doing, you're inventing.

I met Picasso when I was a kid. I turned one of his drawings down which would be worth £37 million now. My dad wouldn't talk to me for a fortnight.

No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.

I started out making $4 for my first fight, but imagine paying $25,000 for a painting...look at me!

A work of art is worth what someone will pay for it.

Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.

The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.

The art world is a bit smaller than the music world, and the music world is a bit smaller than the cinema world. But the art world is pretty tight even though the biggest thing that's happened to it is the auctions, which are the only reason people on the outside know anything about it.

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

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.

Art can retain its value and even make you some money. If you have your iPhone on you - and you probably do - look for the artist's signature, and use that to look up the artist and get a sense of the piece's value before you buy it.

I haven't done much art shopping in Vegas. It tends to be from galleries that are London- or L.A.- or New York-based. We've never had someone standing over our shoulder telling us something is a good investment.

Your regional newspaper, and I like to use this example, in your local museum buys a Picasso, that's news especially if they've spent $10 million for it. But if you don't have a credit on your staff then you don't have anybody who's confident to say whether or not it was a good Picasso, might even be aware of the fact that there are bad Picassos. Arts journalists who don't have the experience of criticism, the skill of criticism, don't think in terms of critical evaluation are not going to be as good a journalist as they might be.