Top 222 Museum Quotes

I’m Chief Executive Officer at Art of the Olympians Museum in Fort Myers, Florida, which was founded by my Mexico City teammate Al Oerter and his wife Cathy in 2005. It shows that Olympians can have another life; we have got art from more than 100 Olympians.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

We met with the poet Frank O’Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.

As I went through ‘This Progress,’ one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright’s emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.

Science gave me a cosmic religious feeling, and I would get the same feeling when I was dragged to the Met and the Museum of Modern Art.

I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

I’m in a museum. I’m a relic.

I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.

I’m not exactly a huge Beatles fan, but when I have a chance to visit a legendary place like the Beatles museum, I definitely use it. It’s historic.

What does culture mean? It’s not a physical thing. I love a museum, but that, for me, doesn’t make you a better person.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

For ‘The Journal of Finn Reardon,’ I traveled to New York City and walked the streets where Finn and his friends would have lived, worked, and played. I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street and toured an actual flat in which families like Finn’s might have lived.

A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for.

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

Every museum is full of nice things. That’s the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

If you want proof of what the country is really all about, just walk through the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Here it is, in the faces of the victims, in the stories of bravery, in the souls and memory of the survivors, the next of kin.

I think about that all of the time and I have this fantasy that I am going to work at a museum someday! I would love to do something like that!

I’ve got a house full of taxidermy. It’s like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.

A lot of our insights are based on the ways in which people spend time at museums. They’re curious, open, interested, and engaging. They want to express themselves and see their own identity refracted through the museum’s.

An art book is a museum without walls.

The modern museum has multiple purposes – to curate and preserve, to research, and to reach out to the public. They challenge us and ask us to question our assumptions about the past or the world around us.

You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there’s no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day, I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously.

I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum.

As artists we need to stop making work only for gallery or museum walls, or the coffee tables of collectors.

You can’t visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.

The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.

If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot.

I want to bring back the human encounter into places where material things have a prime status. In a museum, you’re supposed to look at things and not talk to other people.

Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It’s there to be a museum showcase of all that’s great about American music.

They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought.

I’m going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, ‘That’s a huge idea.’ Yeah, it’s big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That’s maybe a big gallery’s total sales for a given year.

I just get the feeling that if Jesse Helms was in charge of art in America, you’d go into a museum and see nothing but prints of dogs playing cards.

The idea of the museum is to show my work since the start, and I wanted to show all of it, not just to choose between different pieces. They are grouped together in themes – minimalism, androgyny, black and white, graphic, flowers, and so on – from the earliest designs to the most recent ones.

I created a successful outdoor youth festival – the Liverd festival – against all good advice. It was a great way to explore and investigate social sculptures. Having that as my kind of studio, outside of a museum or precious white-cube gallery, that was a kind of education.

The Museum of the Bible, the sprawling, 430,000-square-foot tribute to the good book, has been dogged by controversies long before opening day. It’s been criticized for not including enough Jesus, for excluding various religious traditions, and for being evangelical propaganda.

If you go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, you can see the burn patterns on Friendship 7.

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.

I’m noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum’s ‘Younger Than Jesus’ last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at ‘Greater New York,’ MoMA P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it’s a very direct connection. With visual art, when there’s no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they’re conveying.

I have given permission that my medals be transferred from the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium in New Delhi to the sports museum in Patiala.

We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women’s Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my ‘museum’. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

Music is art to me, and you don’t censor art. You don’t go into a museum and censor things.

So I did a program with the Recording Academy, the Grammy Museum. So pretty much they take, like, one hundred kids during the summer and for a week or two every day they go over something different in music history. Then during the music history part of the program, they would just tell us about the different eras.

At our house, my father loved the arts. Among his favorite things was ‘The Metropolitan Museum of Art Album of Miniatures’ – a box set of small books on different art periods. I’d go into the living room at night and sit on the arm of his chair as he studied the images.