Art Commercialization Quotes

The Muses inspire art and pretend not to notice when Mammon buys it.

The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence.

I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.

By giving the leadership to the private sector in a capitalistic society, we're going to measure the value of art by how many products we can sell.

Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

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

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares - it is just not how you sell art.

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.

Art is a profession, not a shrine.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

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.

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.

Look, there's no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who's always tried to make a living at it, it's been great, I'm very grateful for it. But at the same time, it's not a subculture-y thing anymore; it's something that's in the New York Times and the New Yorker.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

Why do photographers start giving numbers to their prints? It’s absurd. What do you do when the 20th print has been done? Do you swallow the negative? Do you shoot yourself? It’s the gimmick of money.