Arne Glimcher Quotes

Historically, art has always had a market. When one medieval fiefdom defeated another they would drag back its jewels, gold, tapestries and art objects as the spoils of war. Art equaled power, riches and culture.

It’s possible to have more than one interest. I’ve been a painter and did summer stock.

When Robert Benton was doing the movie ‘In the Still of the Night,’ I’d choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part – I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

I like the idea of a love story between men. There is a great affection between men, which exists much more in ethnic groups: Latin, Italian, Jewish.

Fairs are beneath the dignity of art. To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares – it is just not how you sell art.

Money embarrasses me.

No one’s ever called me anything but ‘Arne.’

The ’80s market was only a Japanese market. It was the Japanese outbidding each other for the most expensive works of art. When the Japanese economy went down the tubes, there was no one left to pay the prices that have been recorded for all of those works.

Draw what you see.

There is more to representing art than selling art. The life of the gallery is dependent on the renewal and refreshment of its artists and dealers. When that stops happening, it’s the end.

Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist studios in China. It became the ‘China thing.’

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.

I’ve always been in love with the movies. They’re the dreams of the 20th Century.

When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

I actually taught perceptual psychology at N.Y.U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference – she saved the gorillas.

Everything happens through relationships.

I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director.

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.

Film and art are close together.

I think very often the price paid for a work is the trophy itself.

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.