Top 100 Quotes About Art Museums
#1. I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.
Larry Ellison
#2. People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.
Bill Viola
#3. 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
#4. Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.
Jerry Saltz
#5. I grew up as a kid being able to attend concerts, go to art museums. Santa Barbara was a rich cultural community, and I had access to everything. I think that shaped me as an artist.
Floyd Norman
#6. You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.
Jessa Crispin
#7. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader.
Tyler Cowen
#8. In bluntest terms, art museums risk being commercial institutions in which art is subsumed by economics and the experience of looking at art becomes a form of consumption.
Amy Whitaker
#9. Art museums are little more than big buildings where rectangular old men, hung on the walls by their backs, wait for young people to come stand in front of them.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs
#10. I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.
William Lyon Phelps
#11. It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
#12. In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled.
Jennifer Homans
#13. To surround yourself with beauty isn't frivolous. It's a necessity. If it weren't, then our cities would not be surrounded with art museums and parks.
Charlotte Symonds
#14. I've always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn't until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting.
Sufe Bradshaw
#15. I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine.
Gideon Glick
#16. What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer
#17. I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings ... Boy With Pail ... Kitten On Fire.
Steven Wright
#18. I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#19. When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.
Douglas Wilson
#20. I always loved fashion and clothes. Not because I think that's a woman's place, but because I care about aesthetics. I like art; I like going to art museums, and to me, these things are just manifestations of one's aesthetic sense.
Leila Janah
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.
Vito Acconci
#25. 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
#26. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Albert C. Barnes
#27. Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination.
Nita Leland
#28. It is in the oral traditions of the villages that the arts of India are really alive. The brief Western immortality of museums is pointless to people who have seen eternity in their earth.
Santha Rama Rau
#29. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#30. Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.
Daniel Silva
#31. 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
#32. Most museums - with all their burdens to pay for exhibitions, administration, and security - really don't have any money really to acquire art, with few exceptions.
Eli Broad
#33. Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
Edmond De Goncourt
#34. As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.
Banksy
#35. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.
Rainn Wilson
#36. 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
#37. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#38. Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Jerry Saltz
#39. Mitt Romney announced he will fight former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield in a charity boxing match. You can tell that Romney is serious about it. Today, his butler gave him a piggyback ride up the steps of the Philadelphia art museum.
Jimmy Fallon
#40. Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.
Theodore Zeldin
#41. 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
#42. PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
Ambrose Bierce
#44. 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
#45. During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I traveled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.
Janet Fitch
#49. Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
John Burnside
#50. More and more, museums will look at restaurants and chefs differently - as if they are curating art.
Danny Meyer
#51. 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
#52. Art exhibitions would be less censored if they were rated, G or NC-17, like movies. People in general see galleries and museums as family-appropriate excursions. Censorship is a provided system which caters to lazy parenting, which is publicly-funded and socially accepted.
Adamo Macri
#53. Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#54. [Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it ... )
Vito Acconci
#55. I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Cherie Lunghi
#56. Exposure to the reproductions [of Corbis-owned fine art photographs] is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries.
Bill Gates
#57. There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.
J.G. Ballard
#58. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise - all are now the norm, often edging out much else.
Jerry Saltz
#59. 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
#60. In college I had to major in something, so I was like, "Okay I like art history, so I will major in that." I never really had any ambitions to work in museums or anything, though.
Walter Martin
#61. I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist ... ..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
Jean Dubuffet
#62. Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.
Michelangelo Pistoletto
#63. We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.
Christo
#64. I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.
Alison Jackson
#65. Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums.
Jules Breton
#66. I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.
Thelma Golden
#67. Films go into vaults, art into museums, and music into halls of fame. Most fashion is worn for a few seasons and off-loaded into the recycling bin or, worse, some landfill.
Robin Givhan
#68. We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.
Orhan Pamuk
#69. A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings. See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you.
Alicia Alonso
#70. 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
#71. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. As cultural politics change, museums change with them.
Sharon Waxman
#75. Good docents often begin by asking the viewer, "What do you see in this work?" The idea that the expert should be allowed to constrain the interpretation of others rightly offends our sensibilities about museums and art. It ought to offend us just as much when applied to Scripture.
Dale B. Martin
#76. To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.
Luis Gonzalez
#77. I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
#78. Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.
Yoko Ono
#79. I would never have expected anything that I did would ever appear in first-rate museums around the world. That was just a choice that I made, very early on. I was interested mainly in the entertainment arts. I wasn't as interested in being a fine artists.
Rick Heinrichs
#80. All the painters who appear in our museums are
failures at painting; the only people ever talked
about are failures; the world is divided into two
categories of people: failures and those unknown.
Francis Picabia
#81. Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.
Kiki Smith
#82. When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.
Naturi Naughton
#83. Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.
Dasha Zhukova
#84. Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.
Damien Hirst
#85. My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.
David Blaine
#86. For me, meaning of design is to give soul to objects by Art. Art sometimes need to be in every part of daily life, not only in the galleries and museums.
Baris Gencel
#87. I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.
Christina Aguilera
#88. Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.
Jerry Saltz
#89. 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
#90. A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom.
Wendy Beckett
#91. New Wave art was the rage of the eighties. Now it's exhibited in oldies-but-goodies museums, usually in black-and-pink frames.
Brad Holland
#92. There are self-made millionaires - their aspiration is first to make money. But the once that goal is achieved, they have to look for something and sometimes they become patrons of art or museums. And that is how the world should go.
Tadao Ando
#93. The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#94. Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums she herself will rarely create, only copy.
Esther Vilar
#95. They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
Michael Heizer
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.
Sigmar Polke
#99. There are many museums dedicated to technology, artistic endeavors, music, and that sort of thing. From that perspective, I think games really do have a place as a kind of collaborative art or a synthesis of all these various aspects into a whole, and that, in itself, can be perceived as art.
Hideo Kojima
#100. 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
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