Museum Culture Quotes

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

What does culture mean? It's not a physical thing. I love a museum, but that, for me, doesn't make you a better person.

For all the casual slurs about 'cultural imperialism', British imperialists were more interested in other cultures than anybody before or since, and, if they hadn't dug it up and taken care of it, we'd know hardly anything about the ancient world. What's important about a nation's past is not what it keeps walled up in the museum but what it keeps outside, living and breathing as every citizen's inheritance.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Art should be created for life, not for the museum.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.

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.

Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.

Museums are for dead artists. I'd never show my work in the Tate. You'd never get me in that place.

I spend all day in museums. I even eat my lunch in the museum, and I take a nap for one hour there.

I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.

I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.

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.

I don't want music to be a museum.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.

Every innovation scraps its immediate predecessor and retrieves still older figures – it causes floods of antiques or nostalgic art forms and stimulates the search for museum pieces.

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.