Love Quote by Paul Getty

Getty frames art appreciation the way an oil man might describe demand: exposure creates appetite, and appetite justifies more acquisition. The line sounds almost innocent, even democratic - just a person learning to love what he’s looking at - but the engine underneath is the logic of collecting. “Increased” and “wanted” turn aesthetic experience into a self-reinforcing cycle, less revelation than escalation. It’s the language of compulsion without the confession: desire presented as refinement.

That’s the subtext that makes it work. Getty doesn’t say art made him wiser or calmer; it made him hungrier. The quote quietly normalizes the idea that culture is something you can pursue like capital: you diversify into beauty, then reinvest. Coming from a businessman, the sentence doubles as a defense against the oldest critique of elite collecting - that it’s vanity dressed up as taste. He suggests the opposite: that taste is earned through repeated looking, that ownership (implied, though not stated) is an extension of attention.

The context matters because Getty’s era treated museum-building and collecting as reputation laundering with architectural receipts. Postwar wealth needed a moral vocabulary, and “fine art” supplied one: heritage, civilization, permanence. This line is Getty presenting acquisitiveness as education, consumption as cultivation. It flatters the collector and the audience at once: if desire grows with exposure, then the solution to wanting more isn’t restraint; it’s access - preferably in a gallery with your name on the wall.