Words matter. These are the best Curator Quotes from famous people such as Lucy Worsley, Jerry Saltz, Mike Will Made It, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Munira Mirza, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In big museums, the role of the curator has shrunk in recent years as different branches of curatorial work – such as interpretation, or learning, or conservation – have split off and become professions of their own.
When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won’t miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the ‘Eventocracy.’ All this flashy ‘art-fair art’ and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.
It’s important to show the new generation that soundtracks can be just as exciting as traditional albums if put in the hands of the right curator.
It’s quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then, I knew that I would do this.
Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It’s hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.
It has been a great honor to serve the four campuses of the University of Missouri System in the role of curator, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity.
The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That’s where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you’re more a curator, but that’s important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
The willed recovery of what’s been lost – often forcibly, I suppose – is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn’t even know needed saving.
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 don’t decide where I live. My wife decides. She’s a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
The day I decided I didn’t want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going ‘ooh’ and ‘aah,’ the way they do around the Monets. It just doesn’t happen.
I’m happy to be content-maker as well as curator, so I’m happy to also be a presenter for amazing things.
The privilege I’ve had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works… but what I’ve discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition – to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other.
Once you become a curator, you will inevitably end up on TV, if only to talk about your latest exhibition.
As a curator, I’ve met endless people who feel a ‘special connection’ with Anne Boleyn, or Victorian prostitutes, or various other unlikely candidates.
I see a curator as a catalyst, generator and motivator – a sparring partner, accompanying the artist while they build a show, and a bridge builder, creating a bridge to the public.
I’m sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It’s just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that’s partly my job this time around.
I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I’m still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.
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.
We’re the curator for the African-American experience for the past, present and future. That’s my job.
The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake – they’ve always been there – but the pirates who’ve taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.
I’ve always being interested in clothes – and I’m also the curator of a significant dress collection with 12,000 objects in it – the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.
I don’t often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality.
I don’t really understand why people are so interested in me, personally. I’m just a curator. I’m just telling people things I think are cool.
My job is art curator, not artist. All I have ever wanted to do is immerse myself in art, to enjoy it, to learn about it, to write about it, to talk to others about it.
I don’t like the word ‘poetry,’ and I don’t like poetry readings, and I usually don’t like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I’m kind of a curator, and I’m kind of a night-owl reporter.
I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, ‘Impurity.’ Because that’s it.
I’ve always wanted to play a role as a producer and a curator and to help make drag really have an epic scale and a large audience and a lot of interest.
I play a curator, the most American part you can think of. My work is to protect the Declaration of Independence. I work at the National Archives in Washington.
My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator’s job.
