Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

‘everyone is an artist’
- Joseph Beuys, 1973

‘everyone is a curator’
- Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2016

Careful what you wish for

“You know, they’re buying their country houses and they’re putting their kids in private schools and they need money.”

Art dealer Larry Gagosian discusses his responsibilities towards his artists in the NYT

“Back then, a museum’s fundamental role was about taking care of and protecting the art, but this century it’s much more about the visitor experience.” 
Neal Benezra, director of the SFMoMA talks about 1995

Said and done

To entertain you on your way to the latest batch of OTNSTUDIO photographs, we've looked around for some studio quotes. There's quite a range:

The portentous: The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion. - Chris Ofili

The optimistic: 'I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.' - Anish Kapoor

The impressed: 'Bill's studio was just one painting on his canvas or maybe a few others. But Gorky overwhelmed me with the sense of profusion. There were paintings all around. Overwhelming, I thought, I have come as the crow flies to the real artists in America.' - Elaine de Kooning 
 
The hard core: 'An artist's studio should be a small space because small rooms discipline the mind and large ones distract it.' - Leonardo da Vinci

And the idiotic: 'We allow no geniuses around our Studio.' – Walt Disney

Meanwhile, on OTNSTUDIO we've added some recent photos of Kate Newby’s New York studio from earlier this year,  et al. in January, Peter Robinson in July getting ready for his recent Hopkinson Mossman exhibition, Peter Peryer taken a month later and jeweler Warwick Freeman seen yesterday in his Devonport studio.

Image: Kate Newby at here New York home and studio, 13 April 2015

Double negative

“A plaster cast is exactly like the original except in everything”
Jean Cocteau

Image: plaster cast, foundry Berlin

Less is more

"That would be vulgar"

Art dealer Leo Castelli to art collector Robert Scull on being asked to sell him all the works in Jasper Johns' second exhibition (Scull purchased two but would eventually own 22 major works by Jasper Johns)

Grunt work

“If you want to sell your work, you have to take your pig to the market. And if you want to make more work, you have to sell your pig.”

British artist Ryan Gander talks to the Guardian about selling work at the Basel Art Fair

Good to know

“Art prices are not pulled out of thin air”
ArtBusiness

It'll all come out in the white wash

“Sponsors want exhibits that are popular. I am not saying that popular artists are bad artists but the choice is not as independent as it is when the money is there already. Most sponsors think very carefully about what they want to connect their names and logos to.”
Julia Friedrich, a curator at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne

Space man

“Metaphysics and megalomania mixed on a daunting scale…”

The Guardian’s Michael Prodger describing the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s 36,000 square meter studio on his 81 hectare property in Barjac, France

The price is right

“One should only discuss the price of a work to be acquired up to the point of its acquisition.”
 
Art Museum director  and writer Horst Keller speaking against a Hans Haacke installation that revealed the owners and prices paid over the years for Manet’s 1880 painting Bunch of asparagus.

Parts of the job are excellent

“…to curate is to network. A curator is one single point in a complex network encompassing artists, artworks, ideas, audience and community. An important aspect of my new role is to bring cultural threads together; to engage ideas and people, to link different times and places, to strike the spark which in turn ignites conversations.”
 
Lara Strongman senior curator Christchurch Art Gallery in B.177 the gallery’s latest issue of Bulletin

Advice to collectors

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."
Gertrude Stein

Ground zero

“I don’t want to take credit for bringing him into the art world, but before me he didn’t really have any art.”
Art consultant Maria Brito about her client American rapper Diddy

End game

“I look at artists like a commodity balance sheet. I like to know the age of the artist, how long he was been painting, how many he does a year, how many come up at auction and the frequency, are the prices coming within the estimate or above or below, what the thresholds are, how each year the price has moved.”

Art-as-commodity dealer Olyvia Kwok talks about making money off the top end of the art market in the London Evening Standard

Eat the rich

“I can see absolutely no reason why every arts organisation in this country cannot raise philanthropic funds. I think that too many arts organisations think, ‘well, we live in an area where rich people don’t live, so they’re not going to back the arts’. I think that is pathetic, frankly.”
UK’s Culture Minister Ed Vaizey on being asked whether it was realistic for all arts organisations to raise private funds.

Not a Bacon

"It was so badly burned on the secondary market, it was crispy."

Todd Levin, director of New York's Levin Art Group telling Art in America why a Cindy Sherman photograph that had being doing the rounds on the secondary market failed to sell at auction.

Bedtime story

“If I don’t drink some water I’m going to die.”
 
The last thing British artist Tracey Emin thought to herself before getting out of the bed that became the artwork My bed which it has been announced will go up for auction later this year

Fair enough

“The fastest collector to run to your booth is not always the best collector”
Art dealer, Emmanuel Perrotin in the Art Newspaper

Think biggish

"There are no economies of scale in art and expanding the scale isn't going to increase the percentage of good art."
US art critic and writer, Dave Hickey.

Over the top

“He’s moving on to a really special national role…. He is doing something that is really, really important from a national point of view”

“We’re very glad to have someone with his skills and expertise involved in such an important project.”

Te Papa chairman Evan Williams (top) and Minister of Culture & Heritage Chris Findlayson (bottom) on the sudden announcement of CE Michael Houlihan's leaving Te Papa to take up the role of ‘special adviser on military heritage’.