Top 100 Museum Art Quotes
#1. On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family - five kids and 12 grandkids - so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I'm chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Schwab
#2. Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.
Iggy Azalea
#3. Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.
Ansel Adams
#4. A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond De Goncourt
#5. Hopefully, you will glimpse something of your own life's journey and with Elemental's Power of Illuminated Love, possibly recognize and celebrate something you had not been able to recognize or celebrate before.
Luther E. Vann
#6. Craft is not a category; it's a means. The folks running the museum [Museum of Arts and Design]are sharp, and they know this, but they are in a bind.
Jerry Saltz
#7. I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum.
Larry Ellison
#8. A rude tourist was looking at paintings in a museum. He didn't find anything interesting and turned to the attendant while pointing to a large frame. Tourist: (making an ugly face) Is this what you call art? Attendant: No sir, this is what we call a mirror.
Johnson C. Philip
#9. The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA.
Sloane Crosley
#10. But if I had to choose a single destination where I'd be held captive for the rest of my time in New York, I'd choose the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tim Gunn
#11. I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.
Lewis H. Lapham
#12. I admired him from afar, like a really amazing piece of art that you only see in photographs or behind glass in a museum. So we affectionately referred to him as Handsome McHotpants; more accurately, Elizabeth and I knighted him Sir Handsome McHotpants one night after drinking too many mojitos.
Penny Reid
#13. If you don't work yourself up into a fever of greed and covetousness in an art museum, you're just not doing the job.
Thomas Hoving
#14. 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?
Sharon Waxman
#15. If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life ... The rift is ... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.
Nick Joaquin
#16. Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.
E. M. Forster
#17. 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
#18. I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#19. I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
#20. Then, the stunningly white cubes that make up the Getty Museum. It's an architectural masterpiece funded by a venal billionaire's trust, housing third-rate art. Pure L.A.: might makes right and packaging is all. Traffic
Jonathan Kellerman
#21. What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again. Really great art regenerates the perception of reality; the reality becomes richer, better or not, just different.
Gabriel Orozco
#22. The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.
Eric Drooker
#23. The main function of the museum has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts
Albert C. Barnes
#24. Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#25. Art should be created for life, not for the museum.
Jean Nouvel
#26. I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
Ad Reinhardt
#27. I'd like to go back to Paris someday and visit the Lourve museum, get a good running start, and hurl myself at the wall.
Warren Zevon
#28. I love the arts, and enjoy going to the art museum whenever I get a chance.
Matthew Carter
#29. The art that we should be doing today, in the twenty-first century, is art that is not for the museum.
Tania Bruguera
#30. A museum's meticulous presentation - exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, state-of-the-art armature - creates an institutional authority that is constructed to seem impregnable.
Peter Landesman
#31. There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
Jasper Johns
#32. I bring the girl to a museum, try to show her a little culture, and she turns a Chihuly into a giant phallus.
Nicki Elson
#33. Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality ...
Damien Hirst
#34. The Best of the artist's art, which will one day be in a Museum wall, the Painting that sets the artist apart of all other artist artists.
Kelly Miller
#35. In an art museum, you shall realise how banal and how ordinary the life outside!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#36. If art means as much to you as it does to me, or even if you're just exploring the art world for the first time, I invite you to turn off the boob tube, pry the Wii controllers from your kids' hands, and drag them to a museum.
Lynda Resnick
#37. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.
Jerry Saltz
#38. Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.
Aleksandra Mir
#39. I spent my entire youth in front of a TV watching old movies, and as soon as I was able to get a subway pass, when I was 14, I joined the Museum of Modern Art and was there all weekend watching old movies.
Amy Heckerling
#40. If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.
Jock Sturges
#41. I cannot be Mary Hart - or even worse, Samantha Harris - and stand there with my hip out talking about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes taking Suri to an art museum without making fun of it.
Chelsea Handler
#42. I love art and I find myself at the MoMA all the time. Museums are a real refuge for me. I go to a museum for any break that I have, and I'm very inspired by art.
Susan Stroman
#43. I love Inuit art, and most anything you would find in a folk art museum, as well as children's art or children's book illustrators or illustrators in general - all the kinds of work that my paintings would draw comparisons to.
Neil Farber
#44. 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
#45. I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It's like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo.
Patti Smith
#46. At 16, I decided to do something brave: I went on a prehistoric dig. In fact, I've had my name in a museum since I was 18 years old, not for my painting but for the prehistoric objects I found. That's how I started thinking about art.
Pierre Soulages
#47. The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#48. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Chuck Close
#49. What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.
Jeffrey Deitch
#50. My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.
Steve Prefontaine
#51. I have long accepted that an art fair is not a perfectly curated museum show. Instead, it's more like a brightly lit bazaar, where art is haggled over and handled like any other commodity.
Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis
#52. PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
Ambrose Bierce
#53. The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
Harold Rosenberg
#54. The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
David Rockefeller
#55. Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.
Jerry Saltz
#56. That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
Kehinde Wiley
#57. At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.
Rafael Moneo
#58. Is something art just because a museum hangs it on their wall? Are you networking just because you're standing in a crowded room?
Jarod Kintz
#59. Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.
The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.
Seth Godin
#60. The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
Gerhard Richter
#61. Every year, Bailey, Angie, and Mike head to Philadelphia for the Fourth of July. They visit the Museum of Art, and Mike carries Bailey up those 72 steps and they do the Rocky reenactment. Angie helps Bailey raise his arms and they all yell, 'one more year!' Bailey loves Rocky. Does that suprise you?
Amy Harmon
#62. I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.
Michael Dirda
#63. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.
J.P. Donleavy
#65. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.
Bar Paly
#66. Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
Edmond De Goncourt
#67. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D.H. Lawrence
#68. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Albert C. Barnes
#69. Maybe the museum [of Arts and Design ]needs to follow the advice of its acronym and not be afraid to go a little M.A.D.
Jerry Saltz
#70. If you had a large vase with a big crack down the middle of it, a Japanese art museum would put the vase on a pedestal and shine a spotlight on the crack!
Arielle Ford
#71. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.
Steve Martin
#72. The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.
Theaster Gates
#73. I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
#74. I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.
Olafur Eliasson
#75. I can't stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!
W. Eugene Smith
#76. The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.
Ellen Airgood
#77. It's wonderful to see art in a museum, but it is institutionalised. I don't like the idea of the artwork as something that requires special conditions. I would like it to be universal.
Antony Gormley
#78. Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.
Alain De Botton
#79. I just don't think that the differences you make by donating to a museum or an art gallery really compare to the differences you make by donating to the charities that fight global poverty.
Peter Singer
#80. i am a museum full of art but you had your eyes shut
Rupi Kaur
#81. What I am out to do is make sure that the Met continues to be the most exciting encyclopedic museum in the world. I want to sustain the vibrancy that makes it exciting to work here, that makes it exciting for visitors. The art remains central.
Thomas P. Campbell
#82. Yet any time I opened up a book of medieval art, or walked into the Renaissance galleries in a museum, I was confronted with Mary.
Holly Ordway
#83. Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.
Joseph Heller
#84. I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
Shea Hembrey
#85. I'd already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?
Christian Louboutin
#86. A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
Andrew O'Hagan
#87. The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.
Virginia Postrel
#88. I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.
Heather Demetrios
#89. You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.
Dave Barry
#90. I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
Elizabeth Kostova
#91. I want to reach out and entertain people. I want people to come to a museum that have never been in a museum before. I want also to have enough art references in it that would satisfy the most sophisticated museum goer.
Wayne White
#92. I have heard of you- a kind of revolutionary. Hard to be a revolutionary in the deadly museum business.
Thomas Hoving
#93. I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They're very efficient. They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers.
Sylvia Earle
#94. The woman's essence has always been the most powerful force
much like nature has always been Satan's church.
Quote from the Vampire exhibit at Hallands Kulturhistoriska museum 2012
Czon
#95. Why is comedy the only form of the arts where people think they have to agree with or approve the content? You don't walk through a museum with a towel and throw it over paintings you don't like.
Jim Norton
#96. My computer background is a black and white picture I took of the Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Brazil.
Emma Ishta
#97. Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.
Jerry Saltz
#98. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#99. Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
Barbara Kruger
#100. I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.
Delphine Arnault
