Quotes & Sayings About Museums

It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating. — Kalup Linzy

Designers shouldn't design for museums any more than mummies should die for them. — Ralph Caplan

Education is the lifeblood of museums. — Monica O Montgomery

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter ... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. — John Ruskin

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder's widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn's museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: "Our stuff looks tinny compared to it." At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society's most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever. — Martin Filler

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums. — Martin Filler

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy. — Bryan Stevenson

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

There was this interesting quote: try and live your life without fear and desire. It's this concept that's like when you look at a painting in a museum and you are held in aesthetic arrest. So the I, the ego, is stripped, is gone. The observer and thing become one. That's where fear and desire come in because you don't want to own it, possess it, desire it, and it's not moving you to fear. It's like you're in this harmonious state with the object. — Zack Snyder

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance. — Jerry Saltz

So seek beauty, Miss Prim. Seek it in silence, in tranquillity; seek it in the middle of the night and at dawn. Pause to close doors while you seek it, and don't be surprised if it doesn't reside in museums or in palaces. Don't be surprised if, in the end, you find beauty to be not in Something but Someone. — Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

Wait-you mean the Mall, as in a bunch of museums in DC that we would wander around and I'd pretend like I understood modern art while really thinking, holy crap, a gremlin could have painted that and for all we know did, or the mall, as in picking out a new pair of shoes, eating food that's terrible for us, and making up life stories for all the people that pass us?"
'I can see now that I must have meant the second.'
"What a smart boy. — Kiersten White

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church. — Bill Viola

Our universities and museums are respected around the country. — Jane Byrne

The Arts Council of England, in a 1998 report on 11 countries, found that Germany spent $85 per capita on the arts. The United States spent a shocking $6. And Canada, in its stubborn balance, spent $46 ... It's the Canadian way to be halfway between the Old and New worlds. — Michael Audain

Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups. — Bill Dedman

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had. — Robert Hughes

Eloquent testimony to the recovery powers of wild animals frequently becomes apparent from the study of skeletons housed in museums. — Louis Leakey

I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach. — Chelsea Cain

Visitors say, 'Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!' But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people's homes and who delighted in them as much as -- if not more than -- the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum. — Frances Larson

Q. Which is my favorite country?
A. The United States of America. Not because I'm chauvinistic or xenophobic, but because I believe that we alone have it all, even if not to perfection. The U.S. has the widest possible diversity of spectacular scenery and depth of natural resources; relatively clean air and water; a fascinatingly heterogeneous population living in relative harmony; safe streets; few deadly communicable diseases; a functioning democracy; a superlative Constitution; equal opportunity in most spheres of life; an increasing tolerance of different races, religions, and sexual preferences; equal justice under the law; a free and vibrant press; a world-class culture in books,films, theater, museums, dance, and popular music; the cuisines of every nation; an increasing attention to health and good diet; an abiding entrepreneurial spirit; and peace at home. — Albert Podell

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss. — Banksy

Being in America isn't old-hat - it's where we're from - but I get excited to be in other parts of the world like Athens and Croatia, which were quite cool. I'm a sightseer. I go see the sights and museums. I'm into that kind of thing. — Richie Sambora

I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy. — Alan Dershowitz

Church is not a museum for Saints, but rather a hospital for sinners. — Ann Landers

Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums. — Jules Breton

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. — John Updike

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall. — W. Eugene Smith

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar ... you never know. — Francis Bacon

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture. — Don DeLillo

I definitely think my work comes from things that I liked as a kid, and things I still like now. Monsters and magic and museums and movies, a lot of things that start with 'M' for some reason. — Brian Selznick

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. — Alfred Richard Orage

In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn't know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels - and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn't know. — Ben Lerner

The only place where poverty should be is in museums. — Muhammad Yunus

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined. — Robert Ballard

They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue.
The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos
people who majored in tap dancing. Feds aren't like that. Feds are serious people. Poli-sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror. — Neal Stephenson

Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even "good". What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I know absolutely nothing about art. - pg. 76 — Daniel Quinn

I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums. — Zaha Hadid

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
— Merce Cunningham

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. — Marshall McLuhan

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

Respect whatever it is [ Confederate flag] that you have to respect, because it was a point in time, and put it in a museum. — Donald Trump

I don't do casinos or prisons; I like to do projects that enhance the lives of everyday people, like campus buildings, libraries, museums and government buildings. That's why I love working in the public sector. — Philip Freelon

Pele should go back to the museum. — Diego Maradona

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared. — Peter Heller

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society. — Zaha Hadid

Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film. — Jon Spaihts

Sometimes somebody has an amazing house party and you meet great people and you dance - I've had incredible experiences. But they have been so much fewer than the awful experiences where you're just standing around like, "Why did I come here? We're all just putting on a show for each other and I might as well be in a museum." — Desiree Akhavan

I was just down in Dallas, Texas ... the Assassination Museum ... it's really accurate, you know, 'cause Oswald's not in it. — Bill Hicks

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

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning. — Chuck Palahniuk

In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch phosphorus flour bottles of water and alcohol and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that. — Stephane Mallarme

Words are fossilized butterfly wings,
pretty to look at sometimes,
but only good for Museums.
I want to miserably burn down the Museums. — Jeremiah Walton

Where do you get your ideas? people ask. Sometimes they're at the bottoms of cups of tea. Sometimes they're lurking in my shower. Sometimes they're waiting patiently in glass cases in museums. — Erin Morgenstern

The gods are made of marble
Deep inside a museum
A quadruped monster beckons me to approach
("Outcries") — Helene Baronne D'Oettingen

Some people have criticized the United States and the United States military for guarding oil fields and not guarding the Iraqi National Museum which had priceless antiquities in it. They say that this shows a fundamental lack of respect for Iraqi history. I want to remind those people of this: The oldest relics in the museum, 5,000 or 6,000 years old. That oil is 65 million years old. You had to guard that ... Those antiquities will only last another 5,000 or 6,000 years. When we burn that oil, those fumes will linger long after. — Jon Stewart

If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us. — A.A. Gill

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

A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom. — Wendy Beckett

The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different. — David Adjaye

Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful. — Leonard Nimoy

It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable. — Antony Gormley

Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide communities they serve with something of value beyond their mere existence." - STEPHEN WEIL — G. Wayne Clough

Museum collections have given photography rigor, and mortis. — Bill Jay

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers. — Robert Ballard

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind. — George Lois

The best museum is Bloomingdales. — Andy Warhol

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. — Henri Rabaud

People are moving into modes of participation and self-generation, which apply to everything from museums and television to architecture. — Jake Barton

The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design. — Jerry Saltz

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved. — Jim Dale

The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. — Janet Fitch

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on. — Robert Reich

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game. — V.S. Pritchett

I enjoy living life and I enjoy going to different restaurants and eating my way through a country and going to different museums and learning about different cultures. — Mila Kunis

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

In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes. — Italo Calvino

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings. — Daniel Libeskind

significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but — Bill Bryson

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

If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing. — Bill Watterson

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.
You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads. Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility. And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you. — Rob Brezsny

I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings ... Boy With Pail ... Kitten On Fire. — Steven Wright

Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair. — Muhammad Yunus

When I got the opportunity to do the new wing [the Schauhaus] for the German Historical Museum, for instance, I didn't see it as an opportunity for my own ego, to do something so exciting that every architectural publication would want to put it on the cover. I accepted it because I knew it was going to be a very difficult project, and I wasn't sure I could do something exciting there. — I.M. Pei

I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not "Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece" but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting! — David Sedaris

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. — George Santayana

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol's Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made. — Uta Barth

I can't stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life! — W. Eugene Smith

I go into a gallery or museum, and I realize that I don't have to formulate any opinions if I don't want to. I don't have to think this thing through and write about it at any great length. I can think about it if I want to; if not, I can just walk out. So I can enjoy painting really a lot more than I could when I had that sort of pressure. — Tom Robbins

Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals. — Theodore Zeldin

When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums?21 Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, "If you don't want to see it, don't go to the museum"? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded? If you can't see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. Imagine that a conservative artist had created these works using images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela instead of Jesus and Mary. Imagine that his intent was to mock the quasi-deification by the left of so many black leaders. Could such works be displayed in museums in New York or Paris without triggering angry demonstrations? Might some on the left feel that the museum itself had been polluted by racism, even after the paintings were removed? — Jonathan Haidt

... and do you know what?"
"What?"
"People don't talk about anything."
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the caves they have the joke boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it's only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed people. — Ray Bradbury

The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million. — Studs Terkel

Life is a passage through a museum of beauty. — Robert Genn

Churches are not museums that display perfect people. They are hospitals where the wounded, hurt, injured and broken find healing. — Nicky Gumbel

Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues. — Mason Cooley

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence- stuffed and in a museum. — Mark Twain

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. — Susan Sontag