Quotes & Sayings About Curators

With YouTube - with the Internet in general - you have information overload. The people who don't necessarily get credit are the curators. — Chad Hurley

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. — Chris Abani

I'd call my work 'instinctual design.' I like to find the spirit of a piece that defies time, age, and occasion. My clothes give the wearer the chance to develop their own voice within a wardrobe, and I think of them as curators of their personal style. — Chris Benz

Museum education has the power and the responsibility to do the challenging inner work of tackling tough topics and turning them into teachable moments. — Monica O Montgomery

Education is the lifeblood of museums. — Monica O Montgomery

I spent more than ten years working on the Neues Museum. It was a wonderful experience, an example of real collaboration between architects, conservationists, curators, client, politicians, the media, and the public. Discussions, even when difficult, were always about ideas. Ideas matter to Germans. They're a reflective people. That's attractive. — David Chipperfield

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich. — Anatole France

Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications. — Ethan Zuckerman

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks. — Roger A. Caras

Scenius." Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals - artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers - who make up an "ecology of talent. — Austin Kleon

It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists. — David Galenson

As we become curators of our own contentment on the Simple Abundance path ... we learn to savor the small with a grateful heart. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

If the Bible is correct, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that means there were no dinosaurs, and museum curators have been messing with us. Or the dinosaurs were here, and we never noticed them. Or a lot of people saw them but didn't want to say anything. — Ron Shock

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. — Jerry Saltz

Artists, curators, collectors: we're all part of a regime. — David Balzer

People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit. — Jonathan Zittrain

A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. — Richard Fortey

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio. — Harold Rosenberg

So, you are not so much interested in exploring your feelings about Joy's betrayal. Or the failure of your relationship. You are merely giving me a tour of the museum.'
'The museum? ... I don't follow you.'
'Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.'
'I, uh ... '
'We all superintend such a place, I suppose,' she said, 'although some of us are more painstaking curators than others. That is the category in which I would certainly put you, Dominick. You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. — Wally Lamb

She opened up the glass jar she kept spare buttons in and began sorting through them. It was like handling bits and pieces of the past - buttons from loved ones' dresses and suits and coats carefully gathered up and saved for future use. She had inherited many of the buttons from her mother and grandmother, even her Great Aunt Maggie. Each woman adding to the collection, like curators of a family museum. Now what would happen to them? — Elizabeth Jennings

When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition. — Charles Saatchi

Photojournalism has become a hybrid enterprise of amateurs and professionals, along with surveillance cameras, Google Street Views, and other sources. What is underrepresented are those "metaphotographers" who can make sense of the billions of images being made and can provide context and authenticate them. We need curators to filter this overabundance more than we need new legions of photographers. — Fred Ritchin

If we imagine that the only right that we have is to make commodifiable objects, then we limit our practice, and we limit the great potential for an understanding between collectors, curators and galleries. — Theaster Gates

Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making. — Michelle Grabner

I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees. — Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Painters paint, and history continues to make fools of curators. — Robert Genn

Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties. — Jerry Saltz

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.
All that has changed. Today the way we think of creativity is dominated by Romantic notions of individual genius and originality, and late-capitalist concepts of intellectual property, under which artists are businesspeople whose creations are the commodities they have for sale. — Lev Grossman

In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people? — Burton Silverman

Museum Work and Museum Problems" course, the first academic program specifically designed to cultivate and train men and women to become museum directors and curators. In addition to the connoisseurship of art, the "Museum Course" taught the financial and administrative aspects of running a museum, with a focus on eliciting donations. The students met regularly with major art collectors, bankers, and America's social elite, often at elegant dinners where they were required to wear formal dress and observe the social protocol of high culture. By 1941, Sachs's students had begun to fill the leadership positions of American museums, a field they would come to dominate in the postwar years. — Robert M. Edsel

I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know. — Robert Barry

I've been covering the art industry for nine years, and I still don't feel like I have a clear grasp on what an art consultant does. What's the difference between a dealer and an art consultant? Who are they? What's their day to day like? So I asked a few private dealers, consultants and curators to talk about what they do. Everyone told me a different story. — Paddy Johnson

When I started writing about art, there were no curators. — Waldemar Januszczak

When critics or art historians or curators ask me why I still paint, the answer is that I am not naive. — Luc Tuymans

The leader ... is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas. — Warren G. Bennis

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years. — David Rockefeller

The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity. — Charlotte Bydler

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness. — Peter Landesman

As I made my way through 'On Line,' the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition 'about line' at MoMA, I found myself thinking, 'Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!' In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade. — Jerry Saltz

Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not. — William Gibson

I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy. — Jerry Saltz

We are the curators of life on earth. We hold it in the palm of our hand. — Helen Caldicott

Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination. — Sarah Thornton

Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves. — Jonathan Miller

I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this? — Marion Boulton Stroud

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines. — Jerry Saltz

What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination--that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams...What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives? — Dan Chaon

We are not only a civilization of amateur photographers; we are amateur curators, editors, and publishers. — Charlotte Cotton

To sweeten the hours we share scandals from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart from the museum because it began beating when anyone in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. — Traci Brimhall

attend the auction - curators — Nicholas Sparks

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today. — Charles Saatchi

Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape. — Hans Ulrich Obrist

The creative triangle connects three dimensions: the individual, the domain (the particular symbolic system in which the individual works) and the field (other people working in the domain). So imagine, for example, a sculptor called Kate. To assess Kate's chances of becoming recognised as a highly creative artist, we need to consider not only Kate's own talent and originality (the individual), but also the history and current state of sculpture, in particular the kind of sculpture that Kate produces (the domain), and her connections with curators, journalists, critics, art buyers and other gatekeepers (the field) who contribute to establishing who becomes recognised and celebrated. Without a knowledge of the domain, and connection with the field, Kate is unlikely to make an impact. — David Gauntlett

While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that's left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term. — Jerry Saltz

Extract and expel implicit biases from your work life. Don't taint our visitors with your bias and views. Allow them to form their own conclusions where it's developmentally appropriate. — Monica O Montgomery

I never ever approached a dealer. I have always been approached by dealers or curators or whatever. — Robert Barry

In the spirit of being a reflective practitioner of ourselves we must notice your own behavior as an educator and realize how it influences other. Recognize your privileges: race, gender, ability, career, citizenship, language is all privilege. Imagine how you feel in the visitors shoes and adjust to best help them process and contextualize. — Monica O Montgomery