Jeffrey Deitch Quotes

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.

Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.

One of the interesting things about skateboarding and graffiti is that skateboarding exists in the documentation of an act.

I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious. These are not contradictory concepts in art.

In the 1970s when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show. It never would have happened.

There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.

Every day you run into artists on the streets in SoHo or other creative people you want to do something with. There's nothing to match that chance encounter.

Andy Warhol defined Pop Art.

Sometimes you do a sound installation, and the first day or two it is very exciting. Then you are hearing this every day for a month, and it becomes like a torture.

Many of the museum directors who make an impact personally curate exhibitions.

What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.

I want to use whatever connections to get a super-outstanding Basquiat in the White House. It could be one of mine. It could be something that a friend owns.

Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.

One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.

Effective fund-raising is based on relationships.

Art, film, fashion, music are all going on and interacting simultaneously. And L.A. is very receptive to that fusion.

Celebrity has become, for better or worse, an art form. An artist can use themselves as a medium to become a celebrity as a walking work of art.

From 1940 to the present, the art world and particularly Los Angeles, has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

Part of my agenda has been to support art that engages life with people.

When you go out skating with your friends, you need one friend who knows how to take a good picture. Without the picture, there is no proof that you pulled the trick.

We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular - popular culture.

To be in Brazil and see the work of Os Gêmeos or to be in England and see what Banksy is doing is pretty fascinating to me.

Ramp skating has become the most popular televised form of skating because they can constrain it. They can judge it based on what's happening within this box of a ramp.

I didn't know how to run a business. I was a terrible gallerist, the worst in history, possibly.

Overall, I think any opportunity to expose people to art on a mass level - to have some kid in Oklahoma say to his mother, "I want to be an artist" - is a good thing.

Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business.

Dennis Hopper is one of the great American lives.

When skateboarding and punk merged, it really became a large teen subculture.

Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.