Top 100 Art World Quotes
#1. I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.
Jeff Koons
#2. Why settle for the art world when you can have the whole world?
Martin Firrell
#3. Nowadays New-York is not the exciting place it used to be. It still has great energy; I still put my finger in the socket. But it doesn't feel alive, cracking with that synergy between the art world and music world and fashion world that was happening in the 80s. A lot of people died.
Madonna Ciccone
#4. 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.
Michael Leunig
#5. I believe that it is important for the artist, painter, poet, dancer, etc. to keep in mind that it is the art that drives the art world and not the other way around. Artists and other people of intelligence have the power to bring deeper content to our culture.
Thornton Willis
#6. I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.
John Waters
#7. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#8. 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.
Fred Tomaselli
#9. Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.
Jerry Saltz
#10. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#11. The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.
Jerry Saltz
#12. The art world seems so much bigger than it was when I was growing up.
China Chow
#13. If art means as much to you as it does to me, or even if you're just exploring the art world for the first time, I invite you to turn off the boob tube, pry the Wii controllers from your kids' hands, and drag them to a museum.
Lynda Resnick
#14. Because there's such a long tradition of the arts being very prominent and very varied in Cuban culture and society, people do use the art world as a space for critical reflection and people look to it for that.
Rachael Price
#15. Until I was eighteen, I did not know that you could study fashion design or art. I really didn't know. I already had my nose in the art world; I was already looking at things, but I didn't really get it that you could study that because my school was a very different environment.
Raf Simons
#16. 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.
Raf Simons
#17. Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they're both equal forms of expression.
Kim Gordon
#18. I just try to get away with as much as I can. I don't think that's very radical in the art world.
Barry McGee
#19. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#20. Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association.
Grayson Perry
#21. The art world is now a fashion industry, led by its Whitney Biennial 'nose for the new look.' But nobody, it seems, has the guts or the brains to blow the necessary whistle and holler, 'Hold on guys! What the hell is this ugly bit of business?
Abe Ajay
#22. I'm making art and making decisions and editing things. I don't live my life to broadcast it into the art world; I don't see it as my life on the stage.
Frances Stark
#23. I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been.
Richard Grossman
#24. I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.
Rachel Kushner
#25. 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.
Arne Glimcher
#26. I think rap definitely has its place in the art world. I think it is an art form. But, just like any art form, you can misuse it.
Rick James
#27. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#28. Contrary to popular opinion, things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.
Jerry Saltz
#29. One of the things I love within music and within sports is how often musicians and athletes thank their audience. In the art world, you would never hear that.
Eric Fischl
#30. I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
Jeff Koons
#31. 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.
Adam Davidson
#32. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#34. Penny Arcade said: At that time, the DRUG world and the ART world ran through each other. (1971 - 1974)
Legs McNeil
#35. I was interested in making work that physically changed as it circulated through the art world.
Walead Beshty
#36. Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.
Michael Craig-Martin
#37. 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.
Tom Rachman
#38. Many young artists, they look at the art world and think they can make a lot of money.
James Rosenquist
#39. New York is what Paris was in the twenties ... the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It's the greatest place on earth ... I've got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash.
John Lennon
#40. I would love to collect [art] at some point, but I think the whole rap/art world thing is getting kind of corny.
Drake
#41. MTV in general is involved with so many artists - musicians, actors, people in the fashion industry, and art world.
Karlie Kloss
#42. It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
Camille Paglia
#43. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
Ai Weiwei
#44. The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.
Kehinde Wiley
#45. So sound art I'm always intrigued with how little we use of other senses and we just prioritize the eye and you just want to see everything and navigate. You know the art world is similar. Like I wish people would use their ears a lot more.
DJ Spooky
#46. The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.
Jerry Saltz
#47. 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.
Charles Saatchi
#48. 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.
Arne Glimcher
#49. Even though the art world goes through trends, you do know that it'll come up again.
Kalup Linzy
#50. Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Jerry Saltz
#51. My dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art.
Charles Saatchi
#52. I don't necessarily make much art myself, but after I wrote 'Warped Passages,' I was fortunate to get involved a little in the art world. I got invited to write a libretto for what we called a projective opera, and I also got invited to curate an art exhibit.
Lisa Randall
#53. It is interesting to ask why people who come to view art suddenly posture themselves as full of righteousness. It's as if my artwork suddenly lends a higher moral ground to everyone else in the Thai art world.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#54. When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.
Rachel Kushner
#55. You never know about the art world because it's a matter of opinion. If you look at old art like Rembrandt and Vermeer, it's not completely a matter of opinion. The pictures confront you, and you see exactly what it is. In modern art, a lot of it is suggestive, and it becomes a matter of opinion.
Peter Saul
#56. I love the art world, I love art galleries, I love what it means - I love art.
Nas
#57. 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.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#58. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#59. In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.
Edward De Bono
#60. I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.
Rachel Kushner
#61. The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.
Arne Glimcher
#62. 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.
Armand Hammer
#63. 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.
Rachel Kushner
#64. The fine-art world knows very little about the cartoon world.
Robert Crumb
#65. The galleries are simply corporations in the art world - "Here's a million dollars for this latest piece of crap" - but I'm not about to go along with the gallery system.
Betty Dodson
#66. My mother's an artist. My father was an artist and so I assumed that was normal growing up in art and the art world and spending our time around the world seeing art, experiencing things. It was great.
Bran Ferren
#67. One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.
Jeffrey Deitch
#68. To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.
Jerry Saltz
#69. More people than ever are spending money to support more artists and musicians and give them more leisure time to build cereal balls ... and the art world is eating those balls up!
Brian Chippendale
#70. 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.
Larry Gagosian
#71. I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world
Vivienne Westwood
#72. I think what art is always doing is making us see the world so differently, and I don't mean just colors and light, but re-thinking relationships, spatial relationships, psychological relationships ... those who gravitate to the art world actually want to be puzzled.
Roselee Goldberg
#73. 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.
Marc Jacobs
#74. 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?
David Hockney
#75. I like that the art world isn't regulated.
Jerry Saltz
#76. 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.
Rachel Kushner
#77. But the fact remains that copying is one of the most time-honored training methods in the art world.It forms the basis of the whole concept of apprenticeship.
David Rankin
#78. I think the art world will continue to be a place where people have a certain freedom and creativity to think about what's happening in Cuba.
Rachael Price
#79. There is a complete difference between art and the art market. Prices are high now for the simple reason that there are people are willing to pay them. The market dominates the art world today because at the moment collectors call the shots. Like everything else that won't last forever.
Michael Craig-Martin
#80. Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.
Robert Adams
#81. It was easy to leave the art world after I found out that it was just another corporation. When they told me I had to create the same thing, I rebelled.
Betty Dodson
#82. Yoko [Ono] was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world - the art world is completely dominated by men - so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met.
John Lennon
#83. Senator Helms might very well do that. I would point out to him that we in the art world are not necessarily in the business of making controversial art.
Jane Alexander
#84. A lot of people in the art world hate to use the word Photoshop like it's cheating or easy or something. I say bollocks to that. For me, it's my tool, my paintbrush if you like, and lets me create my own visual language.
Idris Khan
#85. I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.
Kalup Linzy
#86. I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.
Rachel Kushner
#87. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.
David Wojnarowicz
#88. I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.
Mick Ebeling
#89. 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.
Val Kilmer
#90. To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#91. The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.
Michael Leunig
#92. The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.
Rachel Kushner
#93. Stealing things is a glorious occupations, particularly in the art world.
Malcolm McLaren
#94. When I was looking at the Russian Constructivists, these agitprop artists actually painted on trains. It was a heavy influence. They were bringing art to the people, to the masses, and breaking it out of the clubbiness of the art world, which is a monolith.
Jeffrey Deitch
#95. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#96. The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing.
Mark Edward
#97. When I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with.
Roy Lichtenstein
#98. I do think that drugs and alcohol have been glorified and exoticized in such a way that it gets into the art world.
Heath Ledger
#99. 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.
Frank Stella
#100. 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.
Douglas Coupland
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