Museum Funding Quotes

I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.

The museums used to be exhibition halls for government propaganda, and now every city wants to build a museum. A few thousand are to be built in the next few years, all using taxpayer money. But there is no system, no research, no content, no good programs, no good managers.

American museums have become cautious, because it is very hard to get money to do something different or controversial.

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.

I'd love to open a private museum in Paris, London, or New York, but I don't have the money. If I were Bill Gates or Paul Allen, the first thing I would do is build a museum.

I'm going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, 'That's a huge idea.' Yeah, it's big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That's maybe a big gallery's total sales for a given year.

People don't really want to hear me say this, but a black person who will give a million dollars to the Museum of Modern Art but won't give a million to the Studio Museum in Harlem is simply mistaken.

Every week someone rings me up wanting to open a new Messner museum, but I'm not interested.

We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.

Any city in America would like to get a museum built if they didn't have to pay for it.

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

People are going to have a good time, you know. One can go have a good time at these big openings in museums. And people go to have a good time. But the thing has another purpose.In the case of museums, it's always got to do with money, people who donate and things like that. And I believe a certain kind of interest has to be demonstrated.

The number of great museums and nonprofits versus the number of corporate headquarters is incredibly out of whack.

In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

European museums are all dependent on government financing. The moment European governments are under financial pressure, their budgets are cut.

Most museums - with all their burdens to pay for exhibitions, administration, and security - really don't have any money really to acquire art, with few exceptions.

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums.

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