“I tell people you’ve got two choices. You’ve spent a lifetime building this business. Or maybe your father built the business and you carried it on. Maybe your grandfather. You’ve given up vacations sometimes. You worked on weekends and all these things to create this really incredible painting that you’re bringing to me. Now, if they want to auction it, they’re not for me.”
“I tell them they have two choices. They can sell it to us, and it’ll be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We’ll have a wing for their painting. People will come and admire it, which they do. And they will say, ‘That’s one hell of a painter.’ And you get to keep painting. Or you can take this marvelous painting and you can sell it to a porn shop. [Laughter] And he’ll take the thing and he’ll make the boobs a little bigger, something like that. And put it in the window. And a guy will come over in a raincoat a few years later, and he’ll buy it, post it in his window, and it’ll become a piece of meat, basically. We get the ones who care about having in it the Metropolitan Museum.”