Tino Sehgal Quotes

As artists, our primary function is not to be educators - but we are at a time in history, where for us, our history needs to give context for stories that we hope to tell down the road.

So I feel now very much like a guardian. I'm standing in front of art. I'm standing in front of cinema. I'm standing in front of Black culture. I'm standing in front of the history of America, and I'm protecting it by making art, by protecting our art, and by promoting our art.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

Visual presentation of our heritage in glass is needed.

It's not often as an actor you get to be involved with a project that seems to be on the right side of history.

To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.

The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think it's the same thing for a country.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

And one cannot discharge the duty of loyalty without the patient and an open minded study of the institution that marked the country and defined its character.

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

Memorials become relics if they do not stir our modern conscience.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..

I don’t care how many laws you have to break. I want the Guggenheim [Museum] built.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

It is of the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them.

Any nation that forgets its past cannot have a future.

A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.