A Quote by Hans Haacke

Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi. — © Hans Haacke
Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi.
Provocations are like a Molotov cocktail. They only work one time out of ten, but when it works, it can also be dangerous for the arm that is throwing it. It's the price that has to be paid.
I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.
I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.
So my mum bought a jacuzzi, and I was in there along with my father and my sister, when my mother decided it would be the ideal moment to say - 'Guess what everyone in this jacuzzi has in common? You've all sucked on my tits.'
Fashion went from being much more rarefied to being more accessible. Now everything is changing in the art world, too: even the highest level of institutions are becoming more aware of the general public, like the McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan or the Tim Burton at the MoMA or how the Gagosian does historic Picasso shows, bringing museum quality into a gallery. Galleries are becoming more like museums, and museums are becoming more accessible. In the next decade, I think it'll be blown open: there will be a lot of shifting around in terms of how artists approach their work.
Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it.
Museums that aren't perfect are the ones that I love. Museums that aren't overdesigned. I always like to visit the strange, odd museums. In New York, the Frick is absolutely my favorite, favorite place because I like to think that it was someone's home not that long ago.
Marches work, rallies work, civil disobedience works, direct action works, voting works, writing letters works, speaking to churches and schools works, rioting works.
In film, normally what happens is that not many people work more than once. Normally, it breaks couples. It doesn't make them.
My parents have a ridiculous work ethic; my dad just works, works, works, works, works. I think it would be hard to find a guy who's logged more hours than that guy.
The reason artists want to have works in museums is that we want our works to be seen by as many people as possible and we want our ideas to be understood in more complicated ways.
I'm very proud of being persona non grata. I've never been that before in my life, and that suits me extremely wellI'm known for provocations, but I like provocations when they have a purpose. And this had no purpose whatsoever. Because I'm not Mel Gibson. I'm definitely not Mel Gibson.
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.
The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums.
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
Building walls isn't going to work in the long run. Some people are happy with the wall in Israel, but somebody will get a weapon someday and knock it over or something. Walls aren't the answer between countries, though
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