Curator Quotes

#1. [A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths.

Rudyard Kipling

#2. 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.

Joshua Bell

#3. In the daylight, order ruled, fences stood, how-do-you-do's and polite nods were the recipe. But at night, darkness rendered everything still and hush and secret. Minnie was a curator of secrets.

Kiersten White

#4. If I waved that in front of a museum curator, he'd promptly lose control of his salivary glands.

Kevin Hearne

#5. No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.

Harold Rosenberg

#6. I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

Jerry Saltz

#7. Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we're born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings?

Kate Bolick

#8. The Victim was a chronic fuck-up. People Like her always seemed to hang out with The Poisonous Cunt. In turn, she kept their self-esteem low and made sure that they stayed in psychic immiseration. She was a curator of dead souls.

Irvine Welsh

#9. 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.

John Green

#10. 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.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#11. 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.

Jerry Saltz

#12. Gradually as you become curator of your own contentment, you will learn to embrace the gentle yearnings of your heart.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

#13. It was too late to change anything. Too late to make different choices. To be a better mother than she had been. Kate could only be the mother that she was, Amelia's mother - the curator of her memory, the keeper of her secrets, the cherisher of her heart. That, she would always be.

Kimberly McCreight

#14. My mum was a dancer when she was a kid. Then my parents met and eventually had an art gallery; my dad taught himself how to frame pictures, and then he was a curator at an art gallery in the city I'm from. I'm an only child.

Ari Millen

#15. 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.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#16. 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.

Jerry Saltz

#17. Rachel scowled. "You've known Mrak longer than anyone alive. You know what I know - the things he's done, the things he hides from everyone else."
The Curator's smile did not wane as he shrugged. "Indeed I do. But judge-jury-executioner is not my calling. I'm just the gatekeeper.

S.G. Night

#18. I've been in some biennales, and some I haven't. I always like the idea of how you meet the curator, hang out, and figure out who you want to work with.

Kalup Linzy

#19. Online, everyone - the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur - has the ability to contribute something.

Austin Kleon

#20. 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.

Diane Kruger

#21. 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.

Thelma Golden

#22. But the curator said nothing mattered so long as it looked all right to the ignorant." [Lady Brace]
"Sort of government motto. I see." [Sir Henry Merrivale]

Carter Dickson

#23. I'm happy to be content-maker as well as curator, so I'm happy to also be a presenter for amazing things.

Jason Silva

#24. She was the curator of her marriage, collector of swift quotes and unremarked-upon sensations.

Laura Furman

#25. 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.

Tom Waits

#26. One curator said he didn't want my work in his gallery because it was so simple even children understood it. I thought, what a wonderful tribute!

Ted Harrison

#27. I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within.

Hope Barrett

#28. 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.

Thelma Golden

#29. Mammy was now the curator of their lives' museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor.

Khaled Hosseini

#30. No! he wanted to cry out. No, Tania, please come back. What can I leave her with, what can I say, what one word can I leave with her, for her? What one word for my wife?
"Tatiasha," Alexander called after her. God, what was the curator's name ... ?
She glanced back.
"Remember Orbeli-

Paullina Simons

#31. Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Allan Gurganus

#32. 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.

Waldemar Januszczak

#33. 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.

Iris Apfel

#34. But with Celine, she managed to amass a collection of a thousand pieces, each one hand-selected for its historical value and beauty, and then turn her apartment into a masterpiece that you could sit back and enjoy. She wasn't just a collector, she was a curator.

K.A. Tucker

#35. I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.

John Waters

#36. Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. "I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens," says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist.

Ytasha L. Womack

#37. Be a curator of your life. Slowly cut things out until you're left only with what you love, with what's necessary, with what makes you happy.

Leo Babauta

#38. A curator treasures aged bibles, but the wise treasure the wisdom within.

Christian Hunt

#39. An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

Thelma Golden

#40. The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#41. I see you are still unnerved by my presence," the Curator noted. He was still smiling. "My apologies.

S.G. Night

#42. 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.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#43. A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner.

Glenn Gould

#44. The long-dead curator from the Bronx Zoo now had me in his unwavering grip. Close by, the bushmaster too lay in wait.

Dan Eatherley

#45. partner ACC Colin Carswell based at police HQ Sir David Strathern chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police Jean Burchill Rebus's current partner, museum curator

Ian Rankin

#46. It came to me then that we're each something of a constant gardener of a million forgotten galaxies, a librarian of lost places and times, a curator of a museum of random details that really only matter to each of us.

Jonathan Riggs

#47. I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.

Leslie Jamison

#48. I've often been given the career advice to not wear too many hats, which, of course, has just encouraged me to wear other hats, such as being a writer, being a curator, or just doing anything outside of the definition of an artist.

Matthew Brannon

#49. A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule

Robert Scoble

#50. Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art

Daniel H. Pink

#51. Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

Robert Smithson

#52. The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.

Philip Reeve

#53. 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.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#54. I couldn't help but remember the one at my parents' place after they had passed. I'd gone through their things and hadn't kept much, but when it came time for the auction I'd had a strong impulse to bid on everything like some museum curator attempting to keep the collection whole.

Craig Johnson

#55. 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.

Elise Andrew

#56. I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.

Robert Barry

#57. It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists.

David Galenson

#58. WHEN WE ARE OPEN AND GIVING OF OUR LIGHT, WE CREATE AN ENDLESS REFLECTION THAT OUTLIVES OUR HUMAN EXISTENCE.

Gary L. Friedman

#59. When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists.

Vineet Raj Kapoor

#60. I never ever approached a dealer. I have always been approached by dealers or curators or whatever.

Robert Barry