Art should be created for life, not for the museum
Churches are not museums that display perfect people. They are hospitals where the wounded, hurt, injured and broken find healing.
Avicenna California. . . Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.
I do not approve of museums trying just to get people to come in. Whistler was very, very clear on this.
People today read less, take fewer museum trips, and attend fewer concerts. Is that because these activities aren't as fun? The decline. . . can be traced, at least in part, to unconscious stimuli that make us live faster.
I remember when I first started putting things on the web and people were writing about it. I totally didn't keep up with what was going on because I wanted to present stuff in museums and galleries and have some presence on the web. I feel fortunate to have posted stuff in the beginning.
Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.
"Dr. Munro, sir," said he, "I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a -- visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy. "
Where do you get your ideas? people ask. Sometimes they’re at the bottoms of cups of tea. Sometimes they’re lurking in my shower. Sometimes they’re waiting patiently in glass cases in museums.
Blessed is he who invented recording! But what a pity that he was not born centuries earlier! Think only of all that we would be able to hear and therefore understand better. Oh, the unending research in libraries and museums, the readings and collations of texts, the maddening desire to know the truth!
The thing I'm obsessed with is really great bad paintings. I have a storage locker full of them and I want to give them their own museum. You don't even know who these artists are - you can buy them at garage sales, antique stores and places like that. They're brilliant because they were done with the intention of being great, but the artist sort of made a wrong turn. Some of them are hilarious and I can't get enough of them.
Designers shouldn’t design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.
Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.
Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.
And it is true that life lacks the monotony of museums. There come days which seem worthy of being framed, but they are so full of conflicting sounds, of line and color and living, burning light that they never become tedious.
I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They're extraordinarily good.
In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery.
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.
The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.
You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus tour highlighting the rise of the crack trade, yet you can hop on a bus in Chicago tomorrow to see the famous locales of murders. I have to imagine there's some wonderful academic book on the sociology of this out there.