Museum Collection Quotes

I'm in a museum. I'm a relic.

What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

Well, Detroit Institute is kind of a key - probably the largest permanent collection of puppets in the US.

Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.

There are at least 50 cities in the world that would have liked to obtain the Getty Collection.

They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

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.

I adore the tapestries at the Musee de Cluny in Paris!

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.

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

The dresses I wore are in the Smithsonian now.

I have no intention of selling any more of the historical Apollo 11 items in my possession for the remainder of my life. I intend to pass a portion of these items on to my children and to loan the most important items for permanent display in suitable museums around the country.

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.

What you see at the Field Museum is only like, 10 percent of the collection. It's birds of paradise and passenger pigeons and in all these drawers that pull out, these specimens come out and it's spectacular. And it worked out.

I love the Museum of the Moving Image, and I like the idea of bringing artifacts of the cinema into a museum.

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

I do want to keep the Wedgewood Collection in place, intact, and open to the public. Selling it off would be a real tragedy.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.

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.

Each museum is different - the collection is different, the context is different, the relationship between the art and architecture is different.