With the Auckland Art Fair opening tonight we thought you might enjoy this selection of quotes about and by collectors.
"It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout."
Ben Shahn
"Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!"
Kenneth Clark
“I think, therefore I buy.”
Barbara Kruger
"Collectors are happy people."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely."
Thomas Hoving
"I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate."
Philip Johnson
"The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous. I have contented these people with all the many bizarre things that come into my head. And the less they understand, the more they admire it. By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time."
Pablo Picasso
"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."
Charles Saatchi
"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures."
Gertrude Stein
"There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it."
Mark Twain
Image: Alice B Toklas and Gertrude Stein
