Quotes About Artifacts

'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.

She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.

Bone flutes are among the oldest known artifacts of human technological ingenuity . . . Many archeologists believe that our ancestors have been building drums for at least a hundred thousand years, making music technology almost as old as technology designed for hunting or temperature regulation . . . It seems to be jumping more than a few levels in the hierarchy of need to go directly from spearheads and clothing to the invention of wind instruments.

Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.

I'm in a museum. I'm a relic.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger.

The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements - whether it's the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.

Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object's original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.

the French had torn away the silverwork, wrenched down the statues, and ripped the triptychs from their frames.

Let's take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.

A people's legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn't a relationship unless it's left behind its trash.

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.

History is only written from what remains.

To a certain extent a museum is a kind of zoo, a presenter and preserver of what

Zweig fue toda su vida un apasionado coleccionista. Le gustaba poseer y contemplar primeras ediciones de obras de Goethe o Schiller, partituras escritas por Mozart o Beethoven. Las contemplaba sabiendo que ahí mismo, delante de él, en aquellos papeles, estaba el sufrimiento y el gozo, el tormento y el éxtasis del acto grande.

Their uselessness becomes their asset: they turn into totems and fragments of the lost worlds they came from.

I would really love to go on an archaeological dig.

Keyless entry in a car is something that we're used to. Somehow, the home has been very resistant to this. Some of it has to do with security, but today we know that technology, when things are invisible, is actually safer than physical artifacts.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.

I understand," Seth said. "I have nothing else to hope for." "Of course we're trying to get the Sands back," Seth soothed. "I can't say this mission will do that, but of course we hope to recover all of the artifacts. If we can get the Sands of Sanctity, I'll bring the artifact here and heal you. I promise. Okay?

understand," Seth said. "I have nothing else to hope for." "Of course we're trying to get the Sands back," Seth soothed. "I can't say this mission will do that, but of course we hope to recover all of the artifacts. If we can get the Sands of Sanctity, I'll bring the artifact here and heal you. I promise. Okay?