Cultural Institutions Quotes

The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king's power or, later, people's power.

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.

When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.

I love the Prado in Madrid. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is also great.

Museums, free libraries, and art galleries have this in common: that they are each expected to fulfill two purposes which are somewhat incongruous, and require to be pursued by different methods and with different appliances. Each of these institutions is expected to minister to the wants both of trained students and of the untrained and ignorant public; and the demands of these two classes of persons are so diverse that they must be provided for separately

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.

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.

I think that really what our training, what our culture, our religious institutions, our educational and cultural institutions should be about is preparing the heart for that journey outside of the cage of the ribs.

Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

When you get older, you look at who has power differently. When you're 21 years old, and you do something ridiculous at the National Art Gallery and get kicked out by the security guard, in your mind, you're speaking truth to power.

The function of arts centers goes far beyond being places for performance. They might not be explicitly religious, but they are civic and social spaces.

Andrew Carnegie loved libraries; he knew their importance to an educated society and as anchors to our communities. And so, just as some loyal baseball fans travel to attend games at all 30 major league stadiums, over the last decade or so, I have slowly, casually, visited Carnegie libraries whenever I am on the road.

We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of #‎ libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.

Cost overruns are not uncommon in architecture, particularly for designs that depart from structural or technological norms, or demand a finer quality of execution than commercial schemes - conditions typical of buildings for cultural institutions. Budgets are exceeded for many reasons, not all of them within an architect's control.

I do not know how wicked American millionaires are, but as I travel about and see the results of their generosity in the form of hospitals, churches, public libraries, universities, parks, recreation grounds, art museums and theatres I wonder what on earth we should do without them.

Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks.

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.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

MoMA is one of the world's great cultural institutions with one of the world's premier Boards and Museum leadership. It is my distinct pleasure to work with such a talented and highly qualified group. I salute Bob Menschel for the high bar he has set and follow him in the position of Chairman with all the respect he has earned.

We understand hereby, that the family, the business, science, art and so forth are all social spheres, which do not owe their existence to the State, but obey a high authority within their own bosom; an authority which rules, by the grace of God, just as the sovereignty of the State does.

I have no favorite museum, but it could be the National Gallery in London; it could be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Every city has a great museum.

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.

Nightclubs are the equivalent of a Catholic Church in a poor country. You hear a lot of stuff about churches filled with gold while the people are starving. But what elitists don't get is that for poor people, the church is their own mansion. Nightclubs fill the same function.