Curator Quotes

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter. ~ Tom Waits

When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event. ~ Jerry Saltz

I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them. ~ Jerry Saltz

The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives. ~ Mary Roach

It was too late to change anything. Too late to make different choices. To be a better mother than she had been. Kate could only be the mother that she was, Amelia's mother - the curator of her memory, the keeper of her secrets, the cherisher of her heart. That, she would always be. ~ Kimberly McCreight

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; ~ Stewart Brand

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today. ~ Charles Saatchi

It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists. ~ David Galenson

My mum was a dancer when she was a kid. Then my parents met and eventually had an art gallery; my dad taught himself how to frame pictures, and then he was a curator at an art gallery in the city I'm from. I'm an only child. ~ Ari Millen

Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. "I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens," says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist. ~ Ytasha L. Womack

I play a curator, the most American part you can think of. My work is to protect the Declaration of Independence. I work at the National Archives in Washington. ~ Diane Kruger

When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition. ~ Charles Saatchi

The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties. ~ Jerry Saltz

In the daylight, order ruled, fences stood, how-do-you-do's and polite nods were the recipe. But at night, darkness rendered everything still and hush and secret. Minnie was a curator of secrets. ~ Kiersten White

While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that's left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term. ~ Jerry Saltz

They would also need to talk sense to her. The almost-existing children, the husky-voiced daughter, a museum curator perhaps, and the gifted, less settled son, good at too many things, who failed to complete his university course, but a far better pianist than she. Both always affectionate, brilliant at Christmases and summer-holiday castles and entertaining their youngest relations. ~ Ian McEwan

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing. - PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art ~ Daniel H. Pink

One curator said he didn't want my work in his gallery because it was so simple even children understood it. I thought, what a wonderful tribute! ~ Ted Harrison

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule ~ Robert Scoble

I'm happy to be content-maker as well as curator, so I'm happy to also be a presenter for amazing things. ~ Jason Silva

I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in. ~ John Green

I couldn't help but remember the one at my parents' place after they had passed. I'd gone through their things and hadn't kept much, but when it came time for the auction I'd had a strong impulse to bid on everything like some museum curator attempting to keep the collection whole. ~ Craig Johnson

I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich. ~ John Waters

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. ~ Jerry Saltz

My job is art curator, not artist. All I have ever wanted to do is immerse myself in art, to enjoy it, to learn about it, to write about it, to talk to others about it. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate. ~ Iris Apfel

Craig Varjabedian's photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico's cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday. ~ Catherine Whitney

The privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works ... but what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition - to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other. ~ Thelma Golden

The street heaves and winds,
burns and bumps,
but behind the glass
the locksmith,
the old curator of timepieces,
stands motionless
with a single protruding eye,
one amazing eye
which peers into the mystery,
the secret hearts of clocks,
and looks deeply in
until the elusive butterfly
of time in its measure
is trapped in his forehead
and the wings of the watch beat."

-from "To Don Asterio Alarcón, Clocksmith of Valparaíso ~ Pablo Neruda

As I made my way through 'On Line,' the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition 'about line' at MoMA, I found myself thinking, 'Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!' In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade. ~ Jerry Saltz

The milk is long since out of date, the bread all has mold and I think you could start a bacterial plague with what's in the crisper here…"
"Order a pizza," he suggested. "There's a place down on the corner that still owes me ten pizzas, paid for in advance."
"You can't eat pizza for breakfast!"
"Why can't I? I've been doing it for a week."
"You can cook," she said accusingly.
"When I'm sober," he agreed.
She glowered at him and went back to her chore. "Well, the eggs are still edible, barely, and there's an unopened pound of bacon. I'll make an omelet."
He collapsed into the chair at the kitchen table while she made a fresh pot of coffee and set about breaking eggs.
"You look very domesticated like that," he pointed out with a faint smile. "After we have breakfast, why don't you come to bed with me?"
She gave him a shocked glance. "I'm pregnant," she reminded him.
He nodded and laughed softly. "Yes, I know. It's an incredible turn-on."
Her hand stopped, poised in midair with a spoon in it. "Wh…What?"
"The eggs are burning," he said pleasantly.
She stirred them quickly and turned the bacon, which was frying in another pan. He thought her condition was sexy? She couldn't believe he was serious.
But apparently he was, because he watched her so intently over breakfast that she doubted if he knew what he was eating.
"Mr. Hutton told the curator of the museum in Tennessee that I wasn't coming back, and he ~ Diana Palmer

You're the last line of defense. When you're dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?'
'That's not fair. The French didn't fight,' Tatiana said, wanting to be anywhere right now but standing in front of men loading artwork from the Hermitage onto armored trucks.
'They didn't fight, Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose
'
'The art will be saved.'
'Yes! The art will be saved,' Alexander said emotionally. 'And another artist will paint a glorious picture, immortalizing you, with a club in your raised hand, swinging to hit the German tank as it's about to crush you, all against the backdrop of the statue of Peter the Great atop his bronze horse. And that picture will hang in the Hermitage, and at the start of the next war the curator will once again stand on the street, crying over his vanishing crates. ~ Paullina Simons

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. ~ Susanna Kearsley

Gradually as you become curator of your own contentment, you will learn to embrace the gentle yearnings of your heart. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees. ~ Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Before hoarding became a phenomenon, people just called it "collecting" or "being nostalgic." I don't hoard, exactly, but I get it. It's a response to our need and desire for purpose, order, definition, and a fortress. It's a calling that requires constant management, control, and obsessive attention. I am amassing artifacts from the history of me. My garage is the storeroom and temporary exhibition hall of the yet-to-be-built museum documenting the rise and fall of the Marc Age. I am the curator. I decide the meaning and worth of the collection based on my feelings in a moment. ~ Marc Maron

I don't believe in the creativity of the curator. I don't think that the exhibition-maker has brilliant ideas around which the works of artists must fit. Instead, the process always starts with a conversation, in which I ask the artists what their unrealized projects are, and then the task is to find the means to realize them.
pg 10 ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

Are you a relative of her late husband?" the woman asked.
His eyes widened. "I beg your pardon?"
"It must be so hard for her, pregnant and just widowed," the middle-aged woman continued. "We've all done what we could to make her happy here. Mr. Johnson, the curator, is a widower himself. He's already sweet on her. But you're probably anxious to see Mrs. Peterson. Shall I ring her and let her know you're coming?"
Tate's eyes were blazing. "No," he said with forced politeness. "I want to surprise her!"
He stalked out, leaving the rented vehicle where it was as he trudged through the small layer of snow and glared contemptuously at the cars sliding around in the street as they passed. This little bit of snow was nothing compared to the six-foot snowdrifts on the reservation. Southerners, he considered, must not get much winter precipitation if this little bit of white dust paralyzed traffic!
As for Cecily's mythical dead husband, he considered, going up the walkway to the small brick structure where she lived, he was about to make a startling, resurrected appearance!
He knocked on the door and waited.
There was an irritated murmur beyond the closed door and the sound of a lock being unfastened. The door opened and a wan Cecily looked straight into his eyes.
He managed to get inside the screen door and catch her before she passed out.
She came to on the sofa with Tate sitting beside her, smoothing back her disheveled hair. The nausea c ~ Diana Palmer

So what do you do, then?" she demanded after about a block. "I'm the curator of e-manuscripts for the British Library, just outside of Yorkshire." When she stopped abruptly again, he braced himself for what he knew what to come. No one believed him when he talked about his work, and certainly no one believed that he, of all people, was a librarian. Too young, too thin, too...male. ~ Alexis D. Craig

They bragged of what they would be doing if they hadn't gone into this wretched industry: they'd be a curator (possibly the one job where you'd make even less than you did now), a sommelier (well, make that two jobs), a gallery owner (make it three), a writer (all right, four - clearly, none of them were equipped to make money, ever, in any imagining). ~ Hanya Yanagihara

It came to me then that we're each something of a constant gardener of a million forgotten galaxies, a librarian of lost places and times, a curator of a museum of random details that really only matter to each of us. ~ Jonathan Riggs

I see a curator as a catalyst, generator and motivator - a sparring partner, accompanying the artist while they build a show, and a bridge builder, creating a bridge to the public. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history. ~ Roger Kimball

Livia dug around in the bottom of her closet while Blake put the figurine back where it belonged. He handled her belongings like he was the curator in a world-renowned museum. ~ Debra Anastasia

No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry. ~ Harold Rosenberg

Curator Shantrelle P. Lewis left for Amsterdam an Andy Warhol fellow, and came back with a film in her pocket. Please support this confrontation of the Netherlands' violently passive aggressive racist traditions, by an American Southern, aggressive aggressive. She's a top notch thinker and lover of questions ... ~ Dream Hampton

I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings. ~ Leslie Jamison

It's quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then, I knew that I would do this. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines. ~ Jerry Saltz

The Victim was a chronic fuck-up. People Like her always seemed to hang out with The Poisonous Cunt. In turn, she kept their self-esteem low and made sure that they stayed in psychic immiseration. She was a curator of dead souls. ~ Irvine Welsh

If I waved that in front of a museum curator, he'd promptly lose control of his salivary glands. ~ Kevin Hearne

No one really knew who (or what) the Curator actually was, nor could anyone guess as to where he came from or why he stood guard over this gate. He was like the rainclouds outside or the sun behind them: you didn't question where they came from or what they were doing, simply because they had always been there. Some of the more sociable Genshwin had tried several times to wring some interesting answers out of him, but no one had ever been able to get past his enigmatic grin.
It made Rachel uncomfortable. As a youth, she had often tried to provoke him to anger without success. He would just laugh and shake his head at her like a patient father ignoring a petulant child. He was too patient, and she resented that; he was intentionally cryptic and she hated him for it. And the Curator knew it, too. ~ S.G. Night

A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner. ~ Glenn Gould

Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty. ~ Allan Gurganus

Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil. ~ Amitav Ghosh

But the curator said nothing mattered so long as it looked all right to the ignorant." [Lady Brace]
"Sort of government motto. I see." [Sir Henry Merrivale] ~ Carter Dickson

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones.
The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all.
In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a millio ~ Bill Bryson

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is. ~ Joshua Bell

The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of. ~ Philip Reeve

I don't really understand why people are so interested in me, personally. I'm just a curator. I'm just telling people things I think are cool. ~ Elise Andrew

Katherine stopped abruptly and looked at Langdon. "Robert, Melencolia I is here in Washington. It hangs in the National Gallery."
"Yes," he said with a smile, "and something tells me that's not a coincidence. The gallery is closed at this hour, but I know the curator and - "
"Forget it, Robert, I know what happens when you go to museums." Katherine headed off into a nearby alcove, where she saw a desk with a computer.
Langdon followed, looking unhappy. ~ Dan Brown

I AM the current curator of the black trunk and the stories it holds within. ~ Hope Barrett

When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists. ~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people? ~ Burton Silverman

Mammy was now the curator of their lives' museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I see you are still unnerved by my presence," the Curator noted. He was still smiling. "My apologies. ~ S.G. Night

I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around. ~ Bonnie Raitt

[A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio. ~ Harold Rosenberg

Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy's new museum. The job's most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Online, everyone - the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur - has the ability to contribute something. ~ Austin Kleon

I've often been given the career advice to not wear too many hats, which, of course, has just encouraged me to wear other hats, such as being a writer, being a curator, or just doing anything outside of the definition of an artist. ~ Matthew Brannon

Remembering those days always aroused a mixture of emotions in her - something akin to, but not quite, nostalgia. Nostalgia was often romanticized; with these memories, there was no reason to make them any more romantic than they already were. Nor did she share these memories with others. They were hers, and over the years, she'd come to view them as a sort of museum exhibit, one in which she was both the curator and the only patron. ~ Nicholas Sparks