ART WORLD Quotes

Quotes about the Artworld

A collection that examines the art market as a complex system of production and exchange. A relationship between artists, critics, galleries, and collectors that determines value through critique and trade. It results in creating tension between artistic integrity and financial speculation.

These quotes analyze the power dynamics and commercial interests that drive the ecosystem:

Alain Quemin

sociologist of art, art critic and journalist

“Only five countries hold close to 80% concentration of the most successful or visible international artists and Germany and the USA seem to constitute a sort of duopoly on the international art scene far beyond all other nations”
(…)
“Actually, China itself and the rest of the market is still controlled by the West. A few countries in the West that, once again, of the USA, the UK, France, Germany and so on.”
✒ Theories and social mechanism, vol. 2, 2015

Arne Glimcher

art dealer, gallerist, film producer, and film director.

“Interesting art happens usually after a cataclysm or a war. It took the destruction of Germany for a new generation of German artists to be able to build something new that was not referential to the past not intimidated by the past.
In the same way, American had abstract expressionism which is post world war too, China was recovering from the cultural revolution and a very interesting phenomenon I saw happening that was they had an extraordinary narrative to tell, there is no excuse for a narrative in the western art anymore. We’ve been through a kind of formalism and there is no story to tell.”
✒ Big Think – Interview with Arne Glimcher, 2012

Brad Troemel

Artist

“At what point do artists using social media stop making art for the idealized art world audience they want and start embracing the new audience they have?”
✒ “The Accidental Audience” The New Inquiry, 2013

Mark Rappolt

Art Review magazine Asia editor-in-chief

“There’s sometimes too much sense of victimhood about how things go in the art world and sometimes you have to take a deep breath and do something different.”
✒ Interview by Artload, YouTube, 2019

Philippe Hoerle-Guggenheim

Gallery owner, art dealer

“I actually want to challenge the fact that art is a real asset like a real commodity and even though so many people will tell you “it is however only 3% is really the blue ship world and everything else really below that”.
(…)
“So, I’m here to say that actually technology and all the improvements that are happening will guide the way and will create a path for artists to live their own success and for art to be a real commodity versus just an investment into your passion, which are all beautiful reasons but it will also be nice to see an upside”

✒ TedX The Art Market: Today and Tomorrow – YouTube, 219

Richard Amstrong

Director of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum and Foundation

“The art world is “the most opinionated group of people short of the Vatican.”

✒ “Dealer’s Hand” By Nick Paumgarten – The New Yorker, 2013

Vincent Serritella

Artist

“You know the art world wants you to do the same thing all the time because it builds a market around. And it’s like OK well the gallery gonna say this is your market, you are the guy who does this. Personally, I would get bored just doing the same exact work all the time. So, as an artist try to live my artistic life that way is being receptive and open to everything. All kind of arts, all styles, all techniques, I just try to work with my constraints right now, see where that takes me.” (…) “You become a reflection of the world around you, and the world around you becomes what you create”

Zarina Muhammad

Artist

“The art world is notorious for consistently not providing gainful or stable employment, that financial precarity is a huge part of the art world’s homogeneity; it precludes the access of so many people.”

✒ “Ideas for a new Artword”, 2020 – The White Pube

Anne Ellegood

Executive director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art

“We are the institution… Public spaces are political arenas in which power is gained, recognized, underwritten, disputed, attacked, lost and gained.”

✒ Mourning in America, 2014

Dan Hicks

Archaeologist, curator

“We need to start to dismantle those elements of world culture museums that constitute the survival of an old infrastructure of racist ideologies.”

✒ Hyperallergic, 2021

Banksy

Artist

“We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime, we should all go shopping to console ourselves.”

✒ Wall and Piece, 2005

Guerrilla Girls

Artist group

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”
✒ Poster work, 1989

Hans Haacke

Artist

“Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it… If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.”

✒ Museums, Managers of Consciousness, 2025

Jean Baudrillard

Sociologist and philosopher

“This second art market has much in common with poker or potlatch – it is a kind of space opera in the hyperspace of value… Should we be scandalized? No. There is nothing immoral here. Just as present-day art is beyond beautiful and ugly, the market, for its part, is beyond good and evil.”

✒ The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena, 1993

Jerry Saltz

Art critic

“(The art world) is seasoned with obscene amounts of money, however concentrated it is in the hands of a lucky, mostly white 1,500 people.”

✒ Vulture / New York Magazine, 2020

John Berger

art critic, novelist, painter and poet

“Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.”
✒ Ways of Seeing, 1972

Michel Houellebecq

Writer

“It was a realistic portrait of the two famous artists in conversation… The painting was meant to record the moment when Hirst replaced Koons as the number one selling contemporary artist in the world. This marked the triumph… of death and morbid fear over pornography and pleasure.”

✒ The Map and the Territory, 2010

Nan Goldin

Photographer and activist

“The V&A must stop giving cultural legitimacy and social stature to the family who unleashed this crisis… Don’t let your legacy be tarnished by their name.”

✒ The Guardian, 2019

Phoebe Plummer

Climate activist

“What is worth more, art or life? … Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?”

✒ Phoebe Plummer, 2022

Pierre Bourdieu

Sociologist

“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make… The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”
✒ Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984

Rosanna McLaughlin

Writer

“Symbols of the market have seeped into the aesthetic language… Prices, not ideas, dominate.”

✒The Guardian, 2021

Theodor W. Adorno

Philosopher

“The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings.”

✒ “Culture Industry Reconsidered”, 1963