Arne Glimcher

Art Dealer

1938-03-12

Quotes by Arne Glimcher

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• If Abstract Expression reached for the sublime, Pop turned ordinary imagery into icons. Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol illuminated the transformative power of context and the process of reproduction. Claes Oldenburg's soft ice-cream cones and hamburgers changed sculpture from hard to soft, from stasis to transformation.

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• 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.

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