A Quote by Thomas Hoving

When I became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was stodgy, gray, run by elitists. I said, 'Hey, let's kick the thing around.' I wanted to attract young people to the museum. I said, 'Make it hospitable. I want them to come. I want them to make dates, pick up girls, pick up boys - either way; I don't care.'
I want to reach out and entertain people. I want people to come to a museum that have never been in a museum before. I want also to have enough art references in it that would satisfy the most sophisticated museum goer.
I don’t want to be a Princess,” she said finally. “You can’t make me be one.” She knew very well what became of Princesses, as Princesses often get books written about them. Either terrible things happened to them, such as kidnappings and curses and pricking fingers and getting poisoned and locked up in towers, or else they just waited around till the Prince finished with the story and got around to marrying her. Either way, September wanted nothing to do with Princessing.
I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.
Cutting out images you like from art books and framing them is a great way of getting beautiful works on your wall. You can also frame magazine images or pick up inexpensive art at museum gift shops.
If we want to take a bunch of phrases and run them through a Google and say 'Hey, who else has said them,' I can come up with the list in five minutes.
I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.
I think girls from a young age know what they want, and boys kind of have to keep up and catch up to them. Even in kindergarten, girls are pretty much the ones that like the boy first and the boys are like, 'Oh, I want to play with my trucks.' They think it's not cool. I think girls are definitely more ahead than boys.
I didn't want to make Young and Beautiful as very dramatic movie . In a certain way, I wanted to do a girly film. I wanted to make something sweet, pink. With a boy it was too dramatic and too heavy. I had a lot of pleasure with the boys in In the House, I said, "This time I will do a film with girls."
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
You can go into neighborhoods in the United States where people dress a certain way because they don't want to be out of touch, where boys wear pants down to their knees, which nobody has compelled them to do but they pick up the cultural norms, or where girls are improperly dressed by my eyes, but that's what they see in the media.
Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.
One day, Sally Kirkland said to Diana Vreeland, who was the fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar at the time, "I have a young woman I want you to meet. She's very young, but I think you should meet her." When Sally Kirkland told me this, I said, "I can't possibly do that! I'm going to throw up! That's the scariest thing I've ever heard! I can't do that, Sally. I'm not ready to do that!" But Sally said, "You let them make that decision." I was absolutely terrified.
Really it becomes a question of architecture. How do you move people through a space and allow them to have an experience? I, probably more than most people, suffer from museum fatigue. I always want to just stay still or sit in a chair and look at one thing, but that's not the experience of the museum.
The one thing I've always said is I don't want them growing up without a father, and they're my inspiration to make sure I'm the best man I can be. I want them to have the father figure that I never had.
What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.
The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different.
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