Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Hoving

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American educator Thomas Hoving.

Last updated on November 9, 2024.

Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving was an American museum executive and consultant and the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

American - Educator | January 15, 1931 - December 10, 2009

Source: Wikipedia

My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field.

Thomas Hoving

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

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.'

Thomas Hoving

Utopia would mean a park - some large, some small - every four or five blocks.

Thomas Hoving

Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.

Thomas Hoving

No matter how hard I tried to popularize, I never cheapened a great work of art.

Thomas Hoving

My heavily-cleverly disguised low self-regard manifested itself in my constant showing off, my addiction for publicity, and my intolerable 'me-me-me' attitudes and actions. But it's done, isn't it? And no one can really change, can they? And, hey, it has been a lot of fun being the life-long irresponsible, snarky, nasty art scamp.

Thomas Hoving

If you don't work yourself up into a fever of greed and covetousness in an art museum, you're just not doing the job.

Thomas Hoving

The 'Artful Tommy' will never change - and perhaps shouldn't.

Thomas Hoving

Art happens when anyone in the world takes any kind of material and fashions it into a deliberate statement.

Thomas Hoving

To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.

Thomas Hoving

With each change of definition in art, something considered non-art or bad art by a previous generation is suddenly acceptable.

Thomas Hoving

Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.