Art Auction Quotes

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.

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.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

In the art world, Monet means money.

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

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

The '80s market was only a Japanese market. It was the Japanese outbidding each other for the most expensive works of art. When the Japanese economy went down the tubes, there was no one left to pay the prices that have been recorded for all of those works.

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.

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.

One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, 'What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?' Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with 'em.

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.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

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.

When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

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

If you want art, don't mess about with movies. Buy a Picasso.