Top 90 Art World Quotes

For me, there has always been a disconnect with the sort of elitist structure of the high-art world – and my distaste for that is at odds with my feeling that art should aspire to do great things.

I like the idea of multidisciplinary conversations, so in that spirit, I try and make a contribution from the art world into the music world.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don’t mind, I’m just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn’t really a mainstream anymore, is there?

Early on, my way of teasing the art world was by playing at being accessible. Like making pottery: I thought people would buy that for Christmas presents.

A mistake I’ve made is I have not worried sufficiently about the art world, really. I have not concerned myself with the other people in the art world. I’ve been a little too singular, and that’s a mistake I’ve made. But everybody makes a mistake of some kind, and if that’s my only mistake, I’m happy.

When I was making my debut as an artist, I felt that it was very important that I try to combine the background of my own culture, my people, and the country into the contemporary art world. So that’s how I came up with the term ‘superflat.’

The art world was not initially really accepting my kind of work. I was ahead of my time.

Many people misunderstand me – I’m quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It’s like expanding its territory.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of ‘disinterest’ strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

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.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

What is the art world? I never really understood. I started doing this stuff to do what I want to do. Not to be this or that.

I really believe that women run the art world.

Kinkade’s paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I’d love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade’s work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

You cant be an artist without going to art school. Its impossible. Art schools like being plunged into a sheep dip that inoculates you against cliches. It gives you a sensibility you need to get into the art world.

Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public – as well as artists – also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations.

The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world.

I’m going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, ‘That’s a huge idea.’ Yeah, it’s big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That’s maybe a big gallery’s total sales for a given year.

The art world is never going to be popular like the NFL, but more people are buying art and I think that’s cushioning, to a great extent, our art-market cycles.

I don’t want to do things because it will please other people. I’m not doing this to get fame or any attention. I try to be selective about who I get advice from. I would like to contribute to the art world, but, you know, you can’t plan these things.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.

Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.

I can’t see the film industry coming to a grinding halt any time soon. I think we may be more open to negotiations and things like that, but I think the art world tends to thrive in times of recession.

I just try to get away with as much as I can. I don’t think that’s very radical in the art world.

I don’t like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it’s hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

Stealing things is a glorious occupations, particularly in the art world.

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.

I’ve been slagged off completely by the art world.

I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there’s something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.

It’s not so much that art is difficult to make; it’s that the structures and the kind of prejudices that the art world constructs make it seem like creating art is this insurmountable task.

Peggy Guggenheim is a real hero to have done what she did in a man’s world, as the art world still is.

The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we’re not pure enough, good omens appear.

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a ‘conflict of interest.’ But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.

I’m not really well educated – other than an art survey course at the High School of Art and Design in New York when I was, like, 15. I don’t know the history of art, but I got over intimidation from the art world when I realized that I was allowed to feel whatever I want and like whatever I want.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

I made my living as an actor, and I love acting, so I’m an actor. But that gets you in a lot of trouble in the art world.

I don’t have so many things in the fashion world that interest me. It’s probably because I am so deeply into it. Often when you go very deep into something, you also discover what it’s about, and you understand it better. With the art world, I still have a lot of curiosity.

I like that the art world isn’t regulated.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, ‘What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?’ And, ‘How does creativity apply across the board?’

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.

I don’t know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We’re very rigid. It’s funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can’t we take little parts of history and mix it together?

I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings – art is much more ingrained in the culture.