Art Institutions Quotes

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

A lot of my work involves criss-crossing London to visit the many hundreds of projects, theaters, galleries, museums and groups that comprise the capital's astonishingly rich cultural life.

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

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.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

We are going to set up a branch of the St Petersburg Mariinsky Theatre here [on the Far Easter]. We are also planning to open local branches of the Hermitage Museum and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.

I doubt if there is a single really excellent art school now available in New York.

Among living artists, George Condo may be the most embraced by the powers that be.

When museums are left with so little money that their future is in the hands of private donors, then they are unable to develop their own signatures by collecting themselves. On the other hand, though, I think we should also celebrate the fact that there is a lot of art that lives outside of, or on the outskirts of, the art market - and it is doing quite well.

What a museum chooses to exhibit is sometimes less important than how such decisions are made and what values inform them. To have the crucial role of museum professionals usurped by self-serving tycoons in the name of economic imperative threatens not only the integrity of individual institutions but the very principle of art held in public trust.

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 don't plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That's the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don't visit.

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

Money-getters are the benefactors of our race. To them ... are we indebted for our institutions of learning, and of art, our academies, colleges and churches.

Fashion went from being much more rarefied to being more accessible. Now everything is changing in the art world, too: even the highest level of institutions are becoming more aware of the general public, like the McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan or the Tim Burton at the MoMA or how the Gagosian does historic Picasso shows, bringing museum quality into a gallery. Galleries are becoming more like museums, and museums are becoming more accessible. In the next decade, I think it'll be blown open: there will be a lot of shifting around in terms of how artists approach their work.

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake - they've always been there - but the pirates who've taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.

The whole experience co-curating the Biennial was a learning experience. The Suburban and The Poor Farm are not institutions. They are not by design, organized around power structures. Because I am someone who thrives on delineating context, seeing up close the inner workings of the museum was not wasted on me.

Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline.

Art shows and the institutions end up being the couriers for culture for the next generation and are an important component as well. It may seem ironic from one perspective, but I think if you look at my overall strategy, it's actually not out of step.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.