Simon Van Booy Quotes

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.

We are similar to a museum. My function is to present old masterpieces in modern frames.

I definitely am concerned with preservation. For me, what's interesting is the archival state, or how long oil paintings last.

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.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.

Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.

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.

The art and architecture of the past that we know is that which remains. The best is that which remains where it was painted, placed or built. Most of the art of the past that could be moved was taken by conquerors. Almost all recent art is conquered as soon as it's made, since it's first shown for sale and once sold is exhibited as foreign in the alien museums. The public has no idea of art other than that it is something portable that can be bought. There is no constructive effort; there is no cooperative effort. This situation is primitive in relation to a few earlier and better times.

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary.

There's a need to keep the history of an artform going, parallel with the new work that's being done.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

The Metropolitan Museum has all of our collections online, all our scholarly publications and catalogues since 1965. We have online features like the timeline of art history.

Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.

It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

MoMA is one of the world's most admired cultural institutions.

Nobody really needs a painting. It's something you kind of create value for in a way that you don't with a company. It's an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.

If the arts are in peril, we must do our small part to to fight the good fight and protect and preserve.

If you were going through your attic and found a Van Gogh, what would you do? You wouldn't put it in your bathroom; you'd want to share it with the world because you know people will love it.