Top 105 Gallery Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Gallery Quotes from famous people such as Carla Bley, Ronnie Wood, Andrew O’Hagan, Rory Kinnear, Marcel Dzama, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn’t play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world’s best listener.
Carla Bley
Mick has expressed an interest in coming to the gallery tonight because he’s seen me behaving myself lately. He is being much more supportive, which is nice.
Ronnie Wood
When I was growing up, there was a feeling in one’s living room as much as in one’s local gallery that a little elitism was good for the soul.
Andrew O’Hagan
If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different – a different attitude or brushstroke. ‘Hamlet’ is like an entire gallery of old masters.
Rory Kinnear
I don’t go digital. I was never good with technology. I didn’t have a cellphone until I moved to New York. My gallery was like, ‘What? How are we supposed to contact you?’
Marcel Dzama
What makes Burning Man special is the location: a 9-mile circle of gypsum, an ancient dried ocean bed. The ground is like a flat crust with no plants or insects, a perfect outdoor gallery for monumental interactive sculpture and architecture.
Alex Grey
I’ve become convinced that Los Angeles is going to become the next contemporary art capital – no other city has more contemporary gallery space than Los Angeles. We’ve come into our own, finally.
Eli Broad
There is more to representing art than selling art. The life of the gallery is dependent on the renewal and refreshment of its artists and dealers. When that stops happening, it’s the end.
Arne Glimcher
I have had it with people who are threatening me and my kids and my family over simply commenting on the law and criminal procedure, and respecting juries. Because they do work hard. They work way harder than I do; and they work way harder than the rest of those people making those peanut gallery comments.
Ashleigh Banfield
At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
Andrew Wyeth
When some people were going around being surf bums and tennis bums, I was being a gallery bum. I really liked galleries.
Dennis Hopper
There used to be rather serious firewalls between the artist and the buying public – the gallery, the publisher. And technology demolishes that wall and basically says, ‘Self-promote or die.’ And that is a bad head for any sort of artist to be forced into.
Jonathan Franzen
In 1983, I was working at an art gallery in Los Angeles and going to film school at Los Angeles City College. At that time, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young painter and was visiting L.A. for his first show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery.
Tamra Davis
I visit a lot of art galleries. I live in Dublin and there’s a very good gallery called the Kevin Kavanagh gallery.
Ardal O’Hanlon
I have friends in France who are artists. I go to gallery openings and things like that.
Anthony Geary
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso – I remember that experience so vividly.
John Lithgow
My father was king of the guidebooks and our holidays were always planned, taking us from a great gallery to an ace cafe to a beautiful view. And as an actor, I loathe improvisation because there’s no structure and no one knows what’s going on.
Olivia Williams
Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.
Jerry Saltz
Bracketing has turned all my experiences, remembered and present, into a gallery of miracles where I wander around dazzled by the beauty of events I cannot explain.
Martha Beck
I like the idea that you can paint something outdoors, and anyone can see it. It’s open to anyone, and people have to deal with it. In the gallery, it’s the same 150 people on the San Francisco art scene. There’s a dynamic on the street that’s definitely more interesting.
Barry McGee
I didn’t want to be an actress. I wasn’t trying to be in film or an art gallery for me.
Yasmine Al Masri
I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Really, my biggest risk was just the initial step to quit my day job to do music. I was packaging and shipping for an art gallery in Manhattan; I went to school for painting, so I always wanted to work around artwork, even though I wasn’t really contributing anything to the scene.
Aesop Rock
Batman has what is quite possibly the best rogues’ gallery every created. People who have never read a comic can name half a dozen of his foes, and that’s barely scratching the surface.
Gail Simone
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
I have played some wonderful leading roles on stage and had the whole ‘China Beach’ years where I really played a leading man on that. That was a fun change for a character actor. But I’m perfectly happy going back to building my gallery of memorable character roles.
Robert Picardo
I’m someone who’s experienced impostor syndrome – as I think a lot of people have with their careers, especially when they pursue what they’re passionate about, because they want to be good at it. I’ve experienced that as a gay man; I’ve experienced that as a cook, as a gallery director, as a student of psychology.
Antoni Porowski
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
Jim Crace
Only once in the last thirty years have I made a duplicate, and that was a watercolor from my oil picture now owned by the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, called ‘Hark! the Lark.’
Winslow Homer
I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.
Alexandre Desplat
Even when you’re out with someone, you need to get out of your head. And you can try exercises by putting yourself in situations where you may not feel completely comfortable, like going to a gallery opening on your own.
Hill Harper
The Spiral Gallery may happen, too. It is not dependent

The Spiral Gallery may happen, too. It is not dependent on government funding.
Daniel Libeskind
I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
Isaac Marion
At work people are expected to be at the beck and call of employers all the time. You have blackberries and other things, and they just don’t leave you alone. People have less time just to drop into an art gallery.
Jeremy Paxman
I’m not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I’m interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.
Thomas Heatherwick
If you think about the way we experience art, the paradigm is still Western European. If I go to the National Gallery, what am I going to see the most of? I’m not going to see a whole lot of black figures in pictures.
Kerry James Marshall
For me, the gallery legitimates the art production and helps build collections. I don’t think an artist should do everything by himself forever. I did it for years and then slowly built my circle of trust.
JR
I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.
Carrie Mae Weems
I created a successful outdoor youth festival – the Liverd festival – against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.
Natalie Jeremijenko
For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.
Billy Al Bengston
I’m noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum’s ‘Younger Than Jesus’ last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at ‘Greater New York,’ MoMA P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.
Jerry Saltz
I very rarely saw Tom Kite around. I’ve talked to Tom about it. I don’t think Michael Jordan needed to be on the captain’s cart with Kite; he needed to be walking in the gallery, supporting them from outside the ropes.
Payne Stewart
I applied to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and didn’t get in the first year, so I worked at Costa and the Dean Gallery Cafe then applied again and got in the next year when I was 18. I was so excited.
Chloe Pirrie
It shouldn’t be that people think the National Gallery is just for middle-class white people.
Munira Mirza
People see owning a gallery as a way to get rich. I never thought that I could get rich in the art world. I wanted a life in art. I wanted to live with artists. I wanted to make beautiful shows.
Arne Glimcher
I think I grew up in an ‘acultural’ household – no books, no paintings, never went to an art gallery. I say that, but of course we had the TV.
Grayson Perry
When I get some down time on the weekends, I love gallery hopping with friends, in particular checking out Gagosian Galleries – between the three in N.Y.C., there’s always a great show on or something cool to see.
Jessica Hart