Art collector Quotes

It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon.

This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.

I look back on my life with great joy.

I think it was a very successful life. I always did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women's lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it.

[On amassing art for her collection:] My motto was 'Buy a picture a day' and I lived up to it.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light.

In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

If anything can rival Venice in its beauty, it must be its reflection at sunset in the Grand Canal.

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

What should move us to action is human dignity: the inalienable dignity of the oppressed, but also the dignity of each of us. We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure.

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

[On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's.

My knowledge of art ended at impressionism.

My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

What matters and survives is the art.

Don't spoil a good story by telling the truth.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition.

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.

If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.

I don't collect anymore. Everything is so terribly expensive. I don't see anything I like anyhow.

I personally always hated Pop art.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

Its obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. Its vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our carbon footprint, has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.

Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while.

If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway.

I may not be much good at most things, but if I didnt have the pleasure of planning and installing shows, and doing it better than anyone else, I would have stopped buying art many years ago.

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar.

It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

Who's to say what will one day appear to have been trendsetting? Sometimes artists who receive breathless acclaim initially, seem to conk out. Other artists who don't register so keenly at the time, prove to be trailblazers.

We lose dignity if we tolerate the intolerable.

In a world filled with mistrust, armed to the teeth and ready to explode, a realistic attitude might be to consider love as an imperative need.

But nobody is visually naive any longer.

We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

I regularly find myself waking up to art I passed by or simply ignored.

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

Perhaps only silence and love do justice to a great work of art

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me.

I have never cared enough about money to worry about spending it, and have been fortunate to make enough to be spoiled rotten.

If you can't take a good kicking, you shouldn't parade how much luckier you are than other people.

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.

Love and the search for truth are unifying principles.

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.

Peace was the one thing that Max (Ernst) needed in order to paint, and love was the one thing I needed in order to live. As neither of us gave the other what he most desired, our union was doomed to failure.

I took advice from none but the best.

I listened, how I listened! That's how I finally became my own expert.

Be the Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience and Virtue

God waits for us to create him.

Wave after wave has brought to our shores beautiful and mysterious treasures from unknown worlds: figurines, animals, fetishes, masks, ceremonial or useful objects. They are called Primitive for want of a better name...What could never have been written is there, all the dreams and anguishes of man. The hunger for food and sex and security, the terrors of night and death, the thirst for life and the hope for survival.

I primarily buy art to show it off.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity.

The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.