Art Connoisseur Quotes

I hate when dealers talk to me. I love dealers - they're some of our favorite people in the art world. But I hate if they do a sales pitch on me. I can't stand it.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

When you're buying paintings, it feels grown up.

You don't have to be Pope Julius to have great art in your house.

The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament.

I cannot tell good art from bad art. I have no eye for it.

An art book is a museum without walls.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.

People don't buy and sell art based on the personality of the artist. Or there wouldn't be much art bought and sold.

I feel when you walk into somebody's apartment on Fifth Avenue or house in Malibu and you see a Basquiat, a Warhol, a Richard Prince, you say to yourself, '$700,000, $2.2 million, $350,000...' To me that is completely uninteresting. I'd rather go to a house where there's great art and I have no idea who the work is by.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

To me, a critic is some loser who has no idea... someone with an opinion. We all have opinions. No offense, but what makes them dictate what is cool and what is not.

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 love painters because I don't paint, so I get to enjoy art; I like collecting paintings.

I am the sort of guy who does go to modern art shows.

It wasn't that I amassed it with aims of selling it and becoming a rich man. My personality demanded that I be surrounded by the best examples of the world's art.

I've been collecting art for much of my adult life. I started around 1960. And my wife and I really enjoy art a great deal. We don't have a lot of money, so we have works on paper, but we enjoy them a great deal.

I buy some art but I don't like to talk about it.

Constable himself knew the value of such studies, for he rarely parted with them. He used to say of his studies and pictures that he had no objection to part with the corn, but not with the field that grew it.

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.

No doubt any connoisseur, any collector, some bored old millionaire when he shows off his treasures, is seeking in your praise the resurrection and the life.

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.

My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, 'What would be the coolest is contemporary art - it will make me look young and interesting.' I'm more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.