• Pat Denner

  • Stephen Hedgepeth














  • Jalene Ward



About the Buying and Selling of Art

"Art among a religious race produces relics; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade." - Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), English Romantic painter.

"The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence." - Prince Albert (1819-1861), husband to Britain's Queen Victoria.

"The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it." - John Ruskin (1819-1900), British writer, art critic. Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-1860, epilogue, 1888).

"Of all the world's markets, the art market is perhaps the most intrinsically subjective.  No one calculates the price of a painting by tallying the time it took to paint it and multiplying that by the artist's hourly rate.  Nor do raw materials count for much: expensive paintings are, more or less, made of the same stuff as cheap paintings.  For all the experts and connoisseurs and scholars and analysts, when it comes right down to it, the price of a work of art is based on what buyer and seller agree it's worth, and that's all.  And as in almost every other field, where money changes hands in society, women's production has been and continues to be valued below that of men, except in this field, the difference is sometimes tenfold or more."  - Greg Allen (contemporary), American journalist. "The X Factor," New York Times, May 1, 2005, Section 2, p. 42.

From Artlex Art Dictionary www.artlex.com.