I did this whole series on the buffalo soldiers-on black soldiers-I did another series on black cowboys, and I presented myself to the gallery system, and all these people with these massive collections didn't know there were black cowboys or black soldiers. I ended up hitting a niche I didn't know was there.
And several galleries - two had asked me and I said no, because I didn't want to leave things on consignment.
In a way, my father was lucky. He had a hunch that his vision of the National Gallery would interest other collectors and persuade them to come in with him, and that hunch proved to be right.
I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.
Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
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.
I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning's work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.
The New York gallery scene being as incredibly overpopulated and overmoneyed as it is, deep conflicts and contradictions aren't hard to find.
The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me.
My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.
Some people are drawn to a van Gogh or a Rembrandt. Some are attracted to exotic guns. Coins. Stamps. I am attracted to cars.
I don't think the art market is for everybody. Yeah, of course we have a global gallery. But we're like the one-tenth of the one-tenth of the one-tenth. OK? Not just who's buying but who's really seriously engaged with art.
Collectors are paying for our education by purchasing our art.
When I started writing about art, there were no curators.
My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.
I've just opened a show in Florida, although I also have many pieces on display around the world.
Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.
I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way.
The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires
I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
There's been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn't been, until now, million-seller art.
A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.
Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.
