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Quote by Ralph Caplan

“The prospect of physical discomfort has not deterred anyone from buying, or sitting in, chairs that hurt. A painful chair, however, is more willingly bought and endured if it carries the imprimatur of a museum or some other respectable design authenticator. Randall Jarrell noted, with great wit but no exaggeration, that there are people who "...will sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won't buy and sit in if you tell him that it is a chair...”

Quote by Ralph Caplan

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Ralph Caplan
Ralph Caplan

Ralph Caplan, born in 1925, is an accomplished writer whose work spans various fields, including advertising, design, and cultural commentary. Known for his unique perspective and profound insights, Caplan offers readers a distinctive viewpoint. more

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“The greatest treasures are not found in museums, but in our hearts.”

“The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus." "Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?" "White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway." "I don't know." Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.”

“I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?”

“From seven in the morning until half past one the next morning -- that's quite a record time for a visitor to stay at a museum," [Henry Ford] continued. "It proves that you may be even more interested in mechanics than I am. And you almost have to be a fanatic to compete with me. That's certainly something!" he exclaimed, grinning broad approval of our common bond.”

“As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.”