Museums Quotes - Page 10

New Rule: Since our new national position on science is, "Screw it, we prefer witchcraft," let's not just retire the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Let's drive it to one of the five stupidest States and have the locals beat it with sticks. Putting it in a museum is too dangerous. Someone could steal it, fly it into space and notice we revolve around the sun.

Living is like tearing through a museum.

My father has made a museum with my cuttings and photographs.

I personally have never trusted museums. ... It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s ... few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth.

The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.

There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.

A statue of Apollo in a museum does not seem naked, but attach a tie to its neck and it will strike us as indecent ... The text is one of the components of an artistic work, albeit an extremely important component ... But the artistic effect as a whole arises from comparisons of the text with a complex set of ontological and ideological esthetic ideas.

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs.

I've never seen a postcard of my work in a museum.

Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways.

While about one-third of Americans believe in ghosts, you won't find many exhibits on these spooky beings down at the local science museum. Why? Well, one explanation that you might consider, ghosts are just figments of our highly fertile imaginations!

I also got a chance to go to the American Museum in New York, which helped my interest.

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

The number of great museums and nonprofits versus the number of corporate headquarters is incredibly out of whack.

I do not exactly remember at what period I started my museum which absorbed so much of my time.

The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

These are the people who are going to see the pictures in my museum.

We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.

I never think that sticking slavishly to one period is successful, a touch of nostalgia adds charm. One needs light and shade because if every piece is perfect the room becomes a museum and lifeless.

For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance.