via Ready for the Houseand
How could I have been an art critic in New York for 23 years and never attended an auction before? Easy. I was used to loving things that didn't belong to me and talking about them to people they didn't belong to, either. That the things might get shuffled around for money, somewhere out there, was a given, but the fact of their existence was all that really mattered. Nobody said that art was the common intellectual and spiritual property of humanity, because nobody had to. To have a smart and deep take on art -- the drama of it and the fun -- was once to be somebody in the art world, whether or not you had a dime. When I came to art, I wanted to become that kind of person, rich in that way.
Peter Schjeldahl
An Auction at Christie's from The Seven Days Art Columns
4 January 1989