Art Display Quotes

I've got a nice collection of paintings - a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that's like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It's almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There's a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

There's something pleasing about large, well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all, I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.

I don't think anyone would want to come to my gallery show.

And several galleries - two had asked me and I said no, because I didn't want to leave things on consignment.

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

Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.

I don't think China should care if this crazy old guy should have a show here or not. You have so many museums in the West, and so many shows, you need somebody to show the work, otherwise it's empty.

These small shows were decidedly a success. The exhibitions were not too large to be seen easily. It was not an effort, as larger collections of pictures usually are.

I wonder why people use only walls for hanging pictures.

I don't collect art at all. I'm fascinated by art. I receive a lot of presents. My house is full of things, but I am not a collector; it's just that people I work for, and friends, give me a lot of things. There are pictures all over the walls, sculptures, mobiles and paintings. I am embarrassed because I wonder what I should do with them.

Some art needs to be hung on the wall and stared at inquisitively, while other pieces require a more active approach.

Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.

The city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.

I always thought it would be a great thing to do an art carwash. So you can actually go and get your car washed, but while you're sitting around waiting you can walk in that hallway where you look at the cars going through the window, and that could be changing exhibitions.

We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames.

First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity.

I used to think of exhibitions as being practice but they are not.

Perhaps at some time in the future, when you ask a friend to come up and look at your etchings, you will plug in your collection of video art.

It is much to my advantage that several of my pictures should be seen together, as it displays to advantage their varieties of conception and also of execution, and what they gain by the mellowing hand of time which should never be forced or anticipated. Thus my pictures when first coming forth have a comparative harshness which at the time acts to my disadvantage.

Right now I am preparing for another art exhibit in November in Palm Desert.

I find pop art really offensive because it's taking a piece of popular culture and putting it somewhere where people can't see it.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.