The speculation game has grown enormously. It’s fuelled by the auction houses, by galleries, and even by artists- they’re all happy to take the money, but many will not admit it. they complain that speculation is suffocating the art world, which is true. But many collectors are obviously speculating- that’s the reason prices have risen so enormously.
Diego Cortez

Works of art, which represent the highest level of spiritual production, will find favour in the eyes of the bourgeois only if they are presented as being liable to directly generate material wealth.
Karl Marx

Art is sexy! Art is money-sexy! Art is money-sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!
Thomas Hoving

The price illustrates the ease with which art history is now rewritten with a chequebook.
Don Thompson 

Auctions are a bizarre combination of slave market, trading floor, theatre and brothel. They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin and trophy hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight.
Jerry Saltz

 At auctions new values are assigned and desire is fetishized.
Jerry Saltz

Money complicates everything. I have a genuine belief that art is a more powerful currency than money- that’s the romantic feeling that an artist has. But you start to have this sneaking feeling that money is more powerful.
Damien Hirst

There are more people collecting for the wrong reasons, basically as the latest get-rich-quick scheme. they buy art like lottery tickets. 
Mary Boone