Museum curation Quotes

Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

I don’t think we should be selling statues of Nathan Hale at the International Spy Museum. First of all, it was an operation against our allies, the British, but most important, it failed.

Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

I wanted to design a museum in which everything would seem clear.

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

For me, to put together my museum and all my remembrances was a big effort mentally, physically and monetarily.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

I don't particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in 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 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.

We learn a lot, and each museum ends up having its own distinctive character and personality.

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.

We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.

I am part of a team organising an Emma Hamilton exhibition for the National Maritime Museum for 2016, and the amount of planning is a revelation - borrowing from museums and collections all over the world.

Many of the museum directors who make an impact personally curate exhibitions.

I don't think China has professional museums - not in the past, present, or near future.

It is a standing source of astonishment and amusement to visitors that the British Museum has so few British things in it: that it is a museum about the world as seen from Britain rather than a history focused on these islands.