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.

The first painting I remember selling was ‘Panthera.’ I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.

My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren’t as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.

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.

For a while I thought I would work in museums, so my first job after college was an internship at the 9/11 Museum. I quickly found out that I did not want to do that. So I signed up for culinary school, and directly following culinary school, I went to graduate school at McGill.

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a ‘conflict of interest.’ But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

There was very little art in my childhood. 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.

The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum – so I lived in Jane Austen’s house, and slept in Jane Austen’s bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it’s like you’re in a Jane Austen period drama.

I first thought about doing a project about Anna Wintour and ‘Vogue’ when I read an article in ‘New York Magazine’ about the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball, the annual fundraising gala that Anna oversees. It created such a fascinating portrait that I couldn’t help but be compelled.

I might want to open a hotel and design all the rooms. Or maybe a museum that lets me curate all the events.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art’s wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.

If you don’t work yourself up into a fever of greed and covetousness in an art museum, you’re just not doing the job.

I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn’t been changed since the 19th century.

Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is… it’s the scene with Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first ‘Batman,’ the museum scene. Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons.

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

My favourite museum is the British Museum.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I’ll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.

In ‘Night At The Museum 3,’ with Ben Stiller, I was only given a couple of lines. If you are in guys’ comedies, it’s not like you are ever going to just get handed some jokes and a brilliant role.

On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family – five kids and 12 grandkids – so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I’m chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

What I am out to do is make sure that the Met continues to be the most exciting encyclopedic museum in the world. I want to sustain the vibrancy that makes it exciting to work here, that makes it exciting for visitors. The art remains central.

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.

In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it’s still limited. But here you have just everything.

The American Museum of Natural History is my son’s absolute favorite place in the world! So we really, really, really love New York.

The relocated Powerhouse Museum in Parramatta will be the anchor for arts and culture for the region, and now the site for the museum is locked in.

I remember when I first went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I bought this little Moreau print in the gift shop. I took it home, and I was, like, 12 years old or something.

I love ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ – it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson’s ‘Behind The Scenes At The Museum’ – that’s the book that started me writing.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I’ve ever seen them before.

The need for reflection and restraint of power is what led Louis Freeh to order that all new agent classes visit the Holocaust Museum here in Washington so they could see and feel and hear in a palpable way the consequences of abuse of power on a massive, almost unimaginable scale.

I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.

The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting – a zoo, not a natural habitat.

‘The Museum of Innocence’ is not about politics; it’s a love story, but I think it’s political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman.

Many visitors to Chicago know the Loop, the shops on the Magnificent Mile, and the Museum Campus. Meanwhile, much of the bustle is in the developing neighborhoods around the Loop: North, South and West.

I’ve been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I’ve had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I’ve had three or four art books; it’s just another way I have to tell stories.

What’s the name of that famous museum in Paris? The Louvre? I went through that place in 20 minutes.

Cutting out images you like from art books and framing them is a great way of getting beautiful works on your wall. You can also frame magazine images or pick up inexpensive art at museum gift shops.

I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that’s the way I do everything – the way I dress and decorate.

What I hope is I’ll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction – an art dealer running a museum.

I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.

If you see a wonderful archaic Greek marble object in a museum, it’s not only that it’s beautiful, but what comes to your mind is the fact that it’s 2,600 or so years old, and it was done by a human being at that time who you have such a limited ability to grasp – and yet you have this enormous ability to grasp.

A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head.

The Thames could be thought of as England’s longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated.

One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what’s really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.

I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today’s Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.

If people don’t like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

I want to go to the 9/11 Memorial. I heard that’s amazing and crazy to look at, an amazing museum. So I haven’t done that. I’d like to do that.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam’s forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul – where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures – then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.

The Web meant that I didn’t have to schlep a whole bunch of stuff to a museum and fight with all their constraints and make something that, in the end, only 150 people would actually get out to see. Instead, I could put something together in my lab and make it accessible to the world.

A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.

When you’re working on a film, it’s almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You’re photographing somebody else’s world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what the film is about.

My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It’s their fault I’ve become an actress.

Istanbul in the snow is a wonder. The extravagant pleasures on show in the Topkapi Palace Museum – the sultan’s robes thickly lined with squirrel fur, mobile foot-braziers to keep out a cold that whips relentlessly off the Bosphorus – presage modern-day sultanic delights.

Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she’d assure them she wasn’t.

We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames.

We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.

Art should be created for life, not for the museum.

I am a museum curator when I am not on the television and in our collection at Kensington Palace we have a book like Marie Antoinette’s, which belonged to the daughters of George III.

I love the Prado in Madrid. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is also great.

My sixth book, ‘A Breath of Snow and Ashes,’ was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.

A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of a straitjacket.

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.

We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books – pages and pages on it.

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

I’m lucky. Usually you’re dead to get your own museum, but I’m still alive to see mine.

My brother still lives in the house my parents owned in Fairborn. I go back there a lot to visit friends and keep my connection to the National Museum of the Air Force and my membership with the Dayton Engineers Club.

Late 20th century music was a really important thing. It changed the world, and I’m part of that, and now I’m part of the museum that celebrates that.

I’m not against the intergenerational function of the museum, I am not against its address or celebration of the individual, but I am against its continuous, unreflected-on celebration of material production.

I grew up a Red Sox fan. I grew up going to Fenway Park and the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum and Symphony Hall and going to the Common, walking around. My whole family at different times lived and worked in Boston.

People didn’t just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn’t hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit’s incomplete.

I’m hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center serves as a poignant reminder of our past and a trusted source of education for schoolchildren, community members, and visitors from across the country.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Republicans have called for a National African-American Museum. The plan is being held up by finding a location that isn’t in their neighborhood.

I’d already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?

But the customer is the final, final filter. What survives the whole process is what people wear. I’m not interested in making clothes that end up in some dusty museum.

A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.

When I decided to go to art school, it wasn’t necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.

I love collecting market stuff in Mexico. I have an etagere built onto the wall of my living room, which has cubicles that are lit and filled with super inexpensive pottery. You see them in a new way; they become museum pieces.

I have a debt, a loyalty to the museum; the best place for me to do what I wanted to do.

I’m going to stay on stage until I drop dead. Then I’m going to have myself stuffed, like Trigger, and I’m going to put me in a museum.

When I was a little girl, I grew up in Connecticut. Ed and Lorraine Warren’s home was not too far from mine. ‘The Conjuring’ films are based on them; Ed and Lorraine were real people who made a museum in their home.

Even if you can’t afford to travel the world, you can take your children to the museum, zoo or local park. And don’t be afraid to take them to grown-up spots. Eating out in a restaurant teaches children how to be quiet and polite and gives them the pleasure of knowing you trust them to behave.

I think that it’s appropriate to have the Confederate flag perhaps in a museum, but it is not a unifying symbol.

The V&A is an amazing museum, and the collections have always been a great inspiration to me.

I went to Zanzibar on holiday and there was a lot there about civil rights and there was a museum, where there are old slave chambers. It was horrible to go to and they’ve still got the chains there. It opens your eyes a lot.

You put on this set of goggles, and within seconds, your brain is convinced you’re now in a different, virtual environment. You’re somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be a video game, it may be in a real-time movie, a museum exhibit, or a medical surgical training app.

The ‘Robben Island Bible’ has arrived at the British Museum. It’s a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.

One of my major goals is to develop a web of the small Wyoming museums and create a major museum system. There are about eight of these museums, and they are all scattered.

Writing a screenplay’s not rocket science, but I was in a bar, and the bartender came up to me and said, ‘I saw ‘Night at the Museum,’ and the thing about him and his kid brought me and my kid together.’ Something like that… it’s like, ‘Oh, right. That’s why we’re doing it.’

At school, we’d studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible.

The Creation Museum uses fossils to present evidence that there was a global catastrophe, Noah’s Flood, that killed and preserved the remains of creatures all over the earth.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

My husband John’s and my breaks are often very culture heavy. He cannot pass a museum without venturing inside, so we tend to see a lot of architecture and so-called places of interest.

When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I’ll ask the students, ‘How many of you have been to a museum this year?’ Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.

I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.

The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

I’m not going to date a crazy party animal; I’m more into culture. I’d rather go to a museum, travel somewhere, or go to a play. That’s more interesting to me than partying at the hottest club.

I love, love, love, love, love, love Naeem Khan. Every dress he makes looks like it belongs in a museum. You put it on, and you feel like royalty.

It’s a lovely experience walking around a museum by yourself.

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

If I say ‘Find me an interesting painting’ to Google, someday a robot could go around the Picasso museum and take a picture for me.

I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.

When I visited Israel for the first time, in 2014, on a trip sponsored by the National Religious Broadcasters, I went to the Museum of The Bible with our group. There, we saw the most ancient and original versions of both the Hebrew and Christian bibles.

My father has made a museum with my cuttings and photographs.

The architect aspires to build in a city as the artist aspires to exhibit his works in a museum.

It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.

I cannot be Mary Hart – or even worse, Samantha Harris – and stand there with my hip out talking about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes taking Suri to an art museum without making fun of it.

The Bruce Lee Action Museum will represent action in the sense that the word is not just used to mean action in the martial arts or films. It is really meant to be a much broader definition as far as taking action, my father’s belief of self-actualization.

I first saw ‘The Dinner Party’ in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.

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.

When I’m in New York, my favorite place on the planet is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus’s strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum’s view of Modernism for decades.

Despite living in an increasingly digital world, there are a few things I still like to keep as physical reminders. So every time I see an exhibition, I make a pit stop at the museum gift shop to buy a postcard of something that inspired me.

I grew up in New York, and for the first ten years of my life, we lived across from the Metropolitan Museum. When I was an adult, I moved back to that neighborhood and lived there again.

A museum is a spiritual place. People lower their voices when they get close to art.

In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.

I would like to bring people who have never been to a museum into a museum. And I would like to bring museum goers into libraries. I think there ought to be this cross-fertilization.

Let’s recreate the equivalent of the Met Ball in Europe and, rather than for the museum, give the money to environmental causes.

Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum.

I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

I’d love to open a private museum in Paris, London, or New York, but I don’t have the money. If I were Bill Gates or Paul Allen, the first thing I would do is build a museum.

We got our land at the right time, but when we go for additional land for our schools or the museum, there will be extra cost.

Many people will say, well, clothes should be worn; but I think people can look at them in public, like seeing a film. I think museum exhibitions are very important.

We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum.

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still – it’s not something that a museum would really embrace.

Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.

I saw Joseph Cornell’s lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.

If art means as much to you as it does to me, or even if you’re just exploring the art world for the first time, I invite you to turn off the boob tube, pry the Wii controllers from your kids’ hands, and drag them to a museum.

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, ‘New Museum,’ to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency.

The architect who first inspired me to follow this profession was Sir John Soane and his Regency home; well, his three homes, now a museum. The place is like an encyclopedia of paintings, antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and drawings.

My mother is a retired music teacher. She taught me in high school, and she would take us and put us in these madrigal groups. We would go to a museum or whatever and just perform.

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.

My first play, ‘The Colored Museum,’ was done in ’86 at the Public Theater.

Going to a museum is one of those inexplicably tiring things. You’re not actually doing anything, more shifting your weight from room to room than walking. And yet it is one of the more tiring things one can do, no matter how thrilled you are by the exhibits.

It’s great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.

How does one measure the success of a museum?

Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.

The museum at Ortles is dedicated to the world of ice so we wanted visitors to feel like they were inside a glacier.

‘Free’ is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.

I suppose I write music for people, not for the filing cabinet or the museum.

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.

As soon as I could ride a bike… I was always riding over to the Museum of Science and Industry to explore. It’s where I first began to develop a fascination with machines and scientific principles.

Seattle has a long tradition of celebrating local and non-local art – from the Burke and Seattle Art Museums to the Asian Art Museum.

A great day in New York would be to wake up, get a cup of coffee and head up to Central Park for a nice walk. Then I’d go down to the East Village and stroll around. After that, maybe I’d go check out a museum or catch an indie film at the Angelika.

Many comedic stars have tried to a do a ‘Night at the Museum’ type film, in which an everyday Joe reacts to insane circumstances. Many flat out failed.

My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

A tourist will just walk up to a Natchezian on the street and ask, ‘Where does Greg Iles live?’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, right over there; just go knock on the door.’ I’ve had people just walk into my office, walk into my house like it’s a museum just open to the public.

Every week someone rings me up wanting to open a new Messner museum, but I’m not interested.

I was pleased Melissa Leo won Best Supporting Actress for ‘The Fighter’ at the Oscars. I hope that her outfits are maintained in some cinema museum.

Te Papa Museum is brilliant.

It’d be really great to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame mature. It’s a good facility there in Cleveland. I like the museum a lot.

My husband is the romantic one in our relationship. He’s always doing sweet things for me. Each year, we recreate our first date – it was a blind date, and we met at the zoo, followed by a trip to the museum. I’d have to say that’s my favorite romantic date.

I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

When I was preparing ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ I did go to the Museum of Broadcasting and watched an old kinescope of Alfred Drake doing the role on a television special. It was interesting, but I didn’t feel any need to try to copy him.

I look back and can’t believe it sometimes. I have to go to the Derby Museum to see what I really accomplished.

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else’s life.

For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great – and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.

By a museum, I assume you mean an institution dedicated to the events of Sept. 11 and the aftermath. If that is done with sensitivity, I think it would be most appropriate.

There’s a statue of Jimmy Stewart in the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the statue talks better than he does.

Against expectations I was charmed by Gehry’s Edgemar development, which housed the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and positively awed by the Bilbao Guggenheim. That Gehry is a great artist I have no doubt, but talent and determination are no warrant against confusion, nor are they a guaranty to produce great art.

‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,’ the Whitney Museum’s 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it’ll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.