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Museums Quotes

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Museums Quotes

“I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.”

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Book:I'll Meet You There
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“Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century. Nor can any cultural institution solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice, and police violence. But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education.”

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Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
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“Everyone lied about the dinosaurs in the museums: to date they have misled us, or possibly they just do not know … but there you will find, in the corridors, or with loose bones collected - or assembled - remnants of dragons. Yes, many of them breathed fire and flew the skies, dragons were everywhere, and now, hidden in plain sight: those which we now call dinosaurs. Fossils, reptiles, serpents, exotic configurations, archived, displayed: a tangle of spine without the dressing, and, without the truth.”

FantasyMagicLiesMythologyFairyDragonsMuseumsDinosaursFaeryAzlander
Book:AZLANDER - Finding Self: Second Guesses
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“Artists create records of transitory moments, appearing to stop their clocks. They help us believe that some things aren’t transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes—and here is the proof, painted in pole, carved in marble, stitched into quilts.”

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Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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“The first step in any encounter with art is to do nothing, to just watch, giving your eye a chance to absorb all that's there. We shouldn't think "This is good," or "This is bad," or "This is a Baroque picture which means X, Y, Z." Ideally, for the first minute we shouldn't think at all. Art needs time to perform its work on us.”

ArtMuseumsArt HistoryArt Appreciation
Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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“Why do you play such dreary music on Saturday afternoon, when tired mortally tired I long for a little reminder of immortal energy? All week long while I trudge fatiguingly from desk to desk in the museum you spill your miracles of Grieg and Honegger on shut-ins. Am I not shut in too, and after a week of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff? Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning to aspire to. I think it has an orange bed in it, more than the ear can hold.”

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Book:Lunch Poems
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“Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.”

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Book:Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems
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“He had been haunted his whole life by a mild case of claustrophobia—the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome. Langdon’s aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always frustrated him. It manifested itself in subtle ways. He avoided enclosed sports like racquetball or squash, and he had gladly paid a small fortune for his airy, high-ceilinged Victorian home even though economical faculty housing was readily available. Langdon had often suspected his attraction to the art world as a young boy sprang from his love of museums’ wide open spaces.”

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Book:Angels & Demons
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“Memory is your museum, your cabinet of curiosities, your 'Wunderkammer.' It will never be full; there is always room for something new and strange and marvelous. It will never need dusting. It will last as long as you do. You can't let the public in to walk around it, but you can take out the exhibits and share them, share what you know. You will never be able to stop collecting.”

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Book:The Museum Book: A Guide to Strange and Wonderful Collections
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“Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn’s museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: “Our stuff looks tinny compared to it.” At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society’s most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever.”

ArchitectureMuseumsLouis Kahn
Book:Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New York Review Books
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“For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.”

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Author:Ian Tattersall
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“Survival is a funny business, too. A losing game. Literally. They love us, and we lose them all. The ones who made us, the ones who gave us, the ones who sat down and played with us, the ones who held us, or just laid eyes on us. The ones who bought, traded, and sold us. Cleaned us, redeemed us, brought back the sheen on us. Loved us. Learned everything there is to know about us.”

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Book:Metropolitan Stories
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“When a young employee at the Anne Fank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's gal was "neutrality," one spokesperson explained to the British newspaper Daily Mail, and a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere" with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberated for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”

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Book:People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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“Protecting a museum can feel paradoxical, because its mission isn't to conceal valuables but to SHARE, in a way that makes you feel as close to a piece as possible, unencumbered by any security apparatus. Permanently ending nearly all museum crime would be easy: lock the works in vaults, and hire armed guards. Of course, this would also mean the end of museums. They'd now be called banks.”

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Book:The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
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“You don’t know they’ll be white. Maybe the Cloisters is full of Black people, and you’re the right person to knock on the door.” I could hear a cross laugh in Keller’s quiet voice. “I’m pretty sure that the people who set up shop in a castle are going to be white. Museums: last refuge of the ruling class.”

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Book:All the Water in the World
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“Truth is not the secret of a few' yet you would maybe think so the way some librarians and cultural ambassadors and especially museum directors act you'd think they had a corner on it the way they walk around shaking their high heads and looking as if they never went to the bath room or anything But I wouldn't blame them if I were you They say the Spiritual is best conceived in abstract terms and then too walking around in museums always makes me want to 'sit down' I always feel so constipated in those high altitudes”

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Book:A Coney Island of the Mind
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“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it remembers. By what graces the wall of its museums. And what monuments have privileged placement in parks or central traffic intersections. And what holidays and patriotic songs are the bane and balm to generations of school children. Yet one learns even more about a nation by what it forgets. What moments of evil, disappointment, and defeat are downplayed or eliminated from the national narratives. Often in the United States the issues of race and the centrality of African American culture are given short shrift in textbooks, popular chronicles, and national memories.”

RaceHistoryRacismMemoryMuseumsAfrican AmericansBlacksMonuments
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
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“In May 1830, when in Paris alone with little Maurice, she found herself going to museums—the Louvre, the Luxembourg. It was not the first time, but she returned again and again, "as if drunk and nailed to the Titians, the Tintorettos, the Rubens." She suddenly responded to painting as she had long before to music. Whatever métier, whatever trade or profession she would choose, she knew she would be an artist—in letters, in life, in her very being.”

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Book:Infamous Woman: the life of George Sand
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“Museums are a great cultural experience, and by that I mean a great opportunity for you to repeatedly tell your children not to touch things. I find museums incredibly exhausting, and by that I mean acting like you're interested in some of those exhibits. "So this is a painting by another European painter of another unattractive European from the 1700s? Fascinating." It seems like they were only painting the sad, ugly people back then. "Hey, you're hard on the eyes, why don't I paint your portrait?”

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Book:Dad Is Fat
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“What I want to hear from museums in their vision statements is about the greater good, and that greater good is more than service audiences, it's about helping a country find truth, find insight, find nuance, and in many ways, what I hope that cultural institutions like this can do is that they're better suited than most to define reality and to give hope.”

TruthHopeInsightServiceMuseumsNuanceUnrestGreater GoodCultural Organizations
Author:Lonnie G. Bunch III
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