Now people look at 'The Scream' or Van Gogh's 'Irises' or a Picasso and see its new content: money. Auction houses inherently equate capital with value.
These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
Perhaps the world of art is just one vast pretence, in which we all take part since, after all, there is no real cost to it, except to those like Charles Saatchi, rich enough to splash out on junk?
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.
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.
People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical.
I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
There were periods when the art market got overheated, but there is no reason it should appreciate dramatically.
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.
There's something to be said about the art-industrial complex, the collectors who recognize that your work has some sort of future economic value.
If you like looking at 'Starry Night' or water lilies or whatever, then why does it matter if it's an original? If the artist is still alive, and you want to support them, I get it. But if you want some famous dead guy's work, that's just a way for rich people to show off. It's the upper-class version of driving a giant Hummer.
I don't buy art just to make artists happy any more than I want to make them sad if I sell their work.
People who think about art as an investment are pathetic.
Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I've heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast.
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.
Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.
I think the problem with the art market and the art scene is that it is its own beast. It thrives and breathes and defecates independently of the artist.
Most collectors I know don't think of art as a business or as an investment.
Some people buy art because they're confident that it'll be a good store value, and this is kind of a recent phenomenon.
