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.
