"Living is like tearing through a museum."
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Museums quotes
Museums
594 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Museums quotes (page 3 of 30)
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"I personally have never trusted museums. ... It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s ... few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth."
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"Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums."
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"We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough."
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"The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."
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"You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room."
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"Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse."
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"I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic."
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"The only place where poverty should be is in museums."
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"A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch."
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"The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too."
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"Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about."
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"Walking rapidly - or even slowly - through a gallery is equivalent to browsing through a bookstore and reading the blurbs."
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"Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary."
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"The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways."
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"forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums"
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"A woman's quest in life should be to find the perfect apartment. And I have found the perfect apartment. The perfect apartment is the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum. With a sofa."
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"We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors."
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"Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places."
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"The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead."
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