Quotes About Museum

Most important of all would be involving artists in shaping the future of the museum. I wanted to have a direct relationship with living artists. I want that to be primary.

Why would someone want to start a museum in New York City when the Whitney and the Modern were already there? The answer was that the bigger museums were ill-equipped to respond quickly to radical or sudden changes in the arts, in part because exhibitions had to be scheduled years ahead of time to allow for securing loans, preparing catalogue, and, most important of all, obtaining funding.

The burden shouldn't be on the artist to make things the public understands, nor should it be on the museum to show only things that are understandable.

I love Francis Bacon. I just saw a great Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Dallas Museum when I was home for Thanksgiving.

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.

Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern - the latest thing. Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.

Seeing the open pits in the open air, among farms, is the wonder, and seeing the bodies twist free from the soil. The sight of a cleaned clay soldier upright in a museum case is unremarkable, and this is all that future generations will see. No one will display those men crushed beyond repair; no one will display their loose parts; no one will display them crawling from the walls. Future generations will miss the crucial sight of ourselves as rammed earth.

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

Life is a passage through a museum of beauty.

Europe doesn't matter anymore. You know, Europe is basically a giant museum.

Merkel is the opposite of ostentatious. She has kept her small cottage near her home town of Templin, goes to her customary hairdresser in Berlin and from time to time is seen grocery shopping. She devours art. She sometimes phones her one or two favourite museum directors directly to ask them if they wouldn't mind staying open a little longer so that she can see a particular exhibition without any fuss.

This is the Mona Lisa of paleontology.

They were presented to Louis XV, who installed them in his museum, the Cabinet du Roi. Decades later, maps of the Ohio River valley were still largely blank, except for the Endroit où on a trouvé des os d'Éléphant—the "place where the elephant bones were found." (Today the "place where the elephant bones were found" is a state park in Kentucky known as Big Bone Lick.) Longueuil's bones confounded everyone who examined them.

I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

I told him that I apologised, that I understood, but really: I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.

I wondered how i would feel going into some museum and seeing the houses and stolen artifacts of my people stuck away in some exhibition hall. As i spoke i realized that most of the "history" i had been taught about the Indians was probably lies invented by the white man.

The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city.

I came from a background where access to museum culture was rarely granted, and, when you got it, people wondered what the hell you were doing there.

It's wonderful to see art in a museum, but it is institutionalised. I don't like the idea of the artwork as something that requires special conditions. I would like it to be universal.

The Louvre for me is a wonderful experience. Because it continues; it didn't get cut off. It was actually a continuous involvement all the way, and a lot of people have come and gone, come and gone; but I'm still here.

I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.

The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.