Museums Quotes - Page 4

• Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

  Karl Marx

  Civilization, Dancer, Greek

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1976). “Collected works”

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• The historical museum has to be very conservative and careful in its choices. The modern museum, on the other hand, has to be audacious, to take chances. It has to consider the probability that it would be wrong in a good many cases and take the consequences later.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Hands, Choices, Historical

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• Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

  Umberto Boccioni

  Eye, Night, Light

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• Since art is dead in the actual life of civilized nations, it has been relegated to these grotesque morgues, museums.

  Walter Gropius

  Art, Civilized Nations, Grotesque

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• The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Melting, World

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• They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.

  Joni Mitchell

  Future, Tree, Premonition

  Song: Big Yellow Taxi

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• 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.

  David Rockefeller

  Mother, Art, Would Be

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

  Roger Caras

  Historical, Treasure, Artistic

  Roger A. Caras (1993). “A Dog Is Listening: The Way Some of Our Closest Friends View Us”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

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• No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.

  Henry James

  Loyalty, Country, School

  'Hawthorne' (1879)

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• In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

  Georg Baselitz

  Country, Talking, Germany

  "My Paintings are Battles". Interview with Susanne Beyer, Ulrike Knöfel, www.spiegel.de. January 25, 2013.

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• 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.

  Daniel Hannan

  Islands, Gold, Finest

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• In the year 2000, the solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.

  Jimmy Carter

  Life, Taken, Moving

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• Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.

  Georg Baselitz

  Country, Reality, Important

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• I don't have a favorite place to see art. I like to encounter it anywhere, museum, gallery, home, studio, street... I do prefer to see good art, when I see art, but it doesn't matter where I see it.

  James Nares

  Art, Home, Encounters

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• 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

  Country, Art, Balance

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• Respectability is joining chastity in the museum of dead issues.

  Mason Cooley

  Issues, Joining, Chastity

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• The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Business, People

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

  William S. Burroughs

  Artist, Color, Light

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• The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

  Jean Cocteau

  Louvre, Morgues

  Quoted by Roger Shattuck in "A Native Son of Paris", "Jean Cocteau and the French Scene". Book by Jean Cocteau, 1984.

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• I also got a chance to go to the American Museum in New York, which helped my interest.

  Robert T. Bakker

  New York, Chance, Interest

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• 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.

  C. S. Forester

  Book, Reading, Space

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

  Jules de Goncourt

  World, Nonsense

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• Mary is God's masterpiece. Have you ever walked into a museum where an artist was displaying his work? Can you imagine him being offended if you were viewing what he considered to be his masterpiece? Would he resent your looking at that instead of at him? 'Hey, you should be looking at me!' Rather, the artist would receive honor because of the attention you were giving his work. And Mary is God's work, from beginning to end.

  Scott Hahn

  Artist, Giving, Honor

  Scott Hahn (2016). “Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism”, p.94, Ignatius Press

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• Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum. In it you find the same equivocal aspect, the same frozen quality.

  Michel Leiris

  Quality, Frozen, Aspect

  Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.30, University of Chicago Press

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• MUMMY, n. - an ancient Egyptian handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, Animal, Curiosity

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.148, 谷月社

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