Art Curation Quotes

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.

As a total activity - I practice curating, art, architecture, writing, and publishing all together. I still act as a living creature.

In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

I'm still around artists. I don't have anymore wall space. And I don't have the money to collect anymore, the prices are outrageous.

I think I've come through the art-industrial complex - I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art.

I curated this show [Shanghai Biennale ], I was by no means trying to shock people or be controversial.

You were told how much space so it was a matter of whether you could send in two paintings or three paintings, you know, pending where the show was being held. You did submit work to be accepted. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in.

Now there is a big turnover in the galleries. The top galleries are getting better all the time. A lot of galleries just struggle along, then a new one comes along. There are certainly a great number of galleries. I think this argues well for the art but there are, of course, a lot of "phonies" in all the arts.

I primarily buy art to show it off.

The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.

I have 17 full-time archivists working for me who put away in books all the diversity of artwork I do, from drawing to etching to monotypes to prints to lithographs.

I don't necessarily make much art myself, but after I wrote 'Warped Passages,' I was fortunate to get involved a little in the art world. I got invited to write a libretto for what we called a projective opera, and I also got invited to curate an art exhibit.

Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.

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 media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.

Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality.

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.

It wasn't that I amassed it with aims of selling it and becoming a rich man. My personality demanded that I be surrounded by the best examples of the world's art.

Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art.

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.

I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where "Klee and America" is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is not even close to the word. Yes, I like Schumann's Carnaval, but I'm damned if I know why anybody thinks the paintings of Paul Klee profit from being viewed with Carnaval playing in the background.

I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.

More and more, museums will look at restaurants and chefs differently - as if they are curating art.