Art Collection 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.

I'm lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don't want a Picasso on my wall; it's great art, but it's dead art to me. I'd rather have a photograph by someone I've never heard of that really inspires me.

I did work at Christie's for a couple of weeks, getting ready for 'The Devil Wears Prada,' getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art, and everybody was really nice. It was great.

All the rich people collect traditional Chinese art. So it's very natural for Chinese families to still see art as the highest human performance and send their children to this field.

Most of the art I have is more on the beautiful side than the violent or disturbing side.

I collect art books. I have hundreds and hundreds of them and they get me to start hearing things. Sometimes people look at them, but I find that visual art gets me listening, gets me hearing things.

I especially like to collect contemporary art.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

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

The Smithsonian Institute is one of the most popular agencies of government in the United States.

In Naples, Fla., I met a self-made man, a multimillionaire, whose round penthouse apartment is home to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, and Mickey Mantle. He had purchased the most coveted items auctioned by the Mantle family at Madison Square Garden in December 2003.

I like the idea of a fully realized collection with artists.

I never expected the White House to be warm, and the artwork on the walls was extraordinary. I am a fan of the Louvre, but being there it was almost just as good.

The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That's where it all starts to get a bit sticky.

I wouldn't give five cents for all the art in the world.

I really just started buying art as a passion. I never considered it an investment, but it ended up being a good investment.

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 think photography is being recognized and collected. Its values have certainly gone up and continue to go up.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.

The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.