Museum Experience Quotes

I go into a gallery or museum, and I realize that I don't have to formulate any opinions if I don't want to. I don't have to think this thing through and write about it at any great length. I can think about it if I want to; if not, I can just walk out. So I can enjoy painting really a lot more than I could when I had that sort of pressure.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.

Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.

First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity.

I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.

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

The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

The day I decided I didn't want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going 'ooh' and 'aah,' the way they do around the Monets. It just doesn't happen.

As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.

If I go to the museum and see white bodies, black bodies, Asian bodies, Latino bodies, then I will expect to see those things every time I go. That matters a lot.

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Since then I have held many jobs at museums in Colorado and Wyoming. I have also taught summer courses at the University of Colorado.

Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo, 'This is what salvation must be like after a while.' But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.

What I am out to do is make sure that the Met continues to be the most exciting encyclopedic museum in the world. I want to sustain the vibrancy that makes it exciting to work here, that makes it exciting for visitors. The art remains central.

I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

As I went through 'This Progress,' one of two performance pieces by Tino Sehgal that transform Frank Lloyd Wright's emptied-out spiral into a dreamy Socratic-purgatorial journey, the museum literally fell away. I was suspended in some weird nonspace.

I remember being a student, and I would go every Friday to the Louvre and stay for ages, just walking around.

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.

Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

My education in the arts began at the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a Cleveland child, I visited the museum's halls and corridors, gallery spaces and shows, over and over. For me, the Cleveland Museum was a school of my very own - the place where my eyes opened, my tastes developed, my ideas about beauty and creativity grew.

Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. There are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you, stop, get very quiet, and the world should begin to change for you. And if you see me, say something! We can talk about it together.

Despite living in an increasingly digital world, there are a few things I still like to keep as physical reminders. So every time I see an exhibition, I make a pit stop at the museum gift shop to buy a postcard of something that inspired me.