Thoughts on the art market

Image: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
GK Chesterton

I sometimes feel I have nothing to say, and I want to communicate this.
Damien Hirst

A lot of my work is about sales. And it was about being independent from the art market.
Jeff Koons

I would like to see the good in art made popular and the popular made good.
Richard Eyre

When you pay high for the priceless, you’re getting it cheap.
Joseph Duveen

Ninety percent of the art I buy will probably be worthless in 10 years’ time.
Charles Saatchi

To the accountants, a true work of art is an investment that hangs on the wall.
Hilary Alexander

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post office clerk.
Rudolf Bing

Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
Margot Fonteyn

An art can only be learnt in the workshop of those who are winning their bread by it.
Samuel Butler

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Auctioneer, noun. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.
Ambrose Bierce

Art isn’t art until it’s sold. Until then, it’s an obsession and a storage problem.
Anonymous

It is not always the best artists that garner the greatest sales, but the best marketers of their art.
Brian Knowles

If Botticelli were alive today, he’d be working for Vogue.
Peter Ustinov