Hans Haacke Quotes

Museums are interesting. This place where we're almost buying admission to take a break from our lives.

We love going to museums. We are so into history and into art. We find it a great way to decompress.

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

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.

Museums provide places of relaxation and inspiration. And most importantly, they are a place of authenticity. We live in a world of reproductions - the objects in museums are real. It's a way to get away from the overload of digital technology.

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.

Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It's a place you can come to escape, where there's authenticity, there's uniqueness, there's calm, there's physicality.

When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.

People come to museums for storytelling and engagement, and the technology needs to facilitate that.

I haven't sufficient interest in objects or anything I can see around me to do what Oldenburg does.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

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.

To understand a field, you look at its arts. Arts can be cautionary as well as inspiring.

I go to museums all the time.

I feel that the arts have an impact in a way that just makes the world more beautiful.

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!

When I go see a performer, I don't go to criticize. I just go to be entertained. I don't go to give advice; I just go to enjoy.

I don't think the audience goes and thinks of the movie as a piece of art - there are some independent people who may go and have a higher appreciation for filmmaking. It is a great art form, but I don't think you look at a painting and a movie with the same eye.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

I go into a gallery or museum, and I realize that I don't have to formulate any opinions if I don't want to. I don't have to think this thing through and write about it at any great length. I can think about it if I want to; if not, I can just walk out. So I can enjoy painting really a lot more than I could when I had that sort of pressure.

I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.

In the right hands, a comic strip attains a beauty and elegance that, really, I would put against any other art.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.