Museums Quotes - Page 4

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution

A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.

Each museum is different - the collection is different, the context is different, the relationship between the art and architecture is different.

Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.

A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner.

Pele should go back to the museum.

Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.

I sailed on the cold air currents above the rooftops of Paris. I could see the river, the Louvre Museum, the gardens and palaces. And a mouse-yum. Hang on, Carter, I thought. not hunting mice.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.

The debut show, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There’s good work here, but much of what’s on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building, too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement.

A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.

Anyone who has walked through the deserted palaces of Versailles or Vienna realise how much of a part of the life of a nation is lost when a monarchy is abolished. If buckingham palace and windsor castle were transformed into museums, if one politician competed against another for president of the republic, Britain would be a sadder and less interesting place. Our politicians are not men such as could challenge more than a thousand years of history.

Despite living in an increasingly digital world, there are a few things I still like to keep as physical reminders. So every time I see an exhibition, I make a pit stop at the museum gift shop to buy a postcard of something that inspired me.

The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.

Until the Eighties, Oslo was a rather boring town, but it's changed a lot, and is now much more cosmopolitan. If I go downtown, I visit the harbour to see the tall ships and the ferries, and to admire the modern architecture such as the Opera House or the new Astrup Fearnley Museum on the water's edge.

I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.

Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

The art that we should be doing today, in the twenty-first century, is art that is not for the museum.

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy

If every piece is perfect the room becomes a museum and lifeless.

I take the museum space also as sacred in a sense.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

SAD, BUT ONE DAY OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TO VISIT MUSEUMS TO SEE WHAT A LADY LOOKS LIKE.