Top 58 Curator Quotes & Sayings

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.

If you work as a curator, as I do, at Hampton Court, you sometimes wonder if there might be more to life than Henry VIII.

The day I decided I didn't want to be a 19th-Century European curator, I knew I would never have the experience of people coming and going 'ooh' and 'aah,' the way they do around the Monets. It just doesn't happen.

The main joy I have in owning or being a part of my own label is the platform I've created to really push other artists and this other kind of musical muscle I get to exercise, it's not just me as a creator of music but me as a curator. That's been really exciting and I do get to have the autonomy and control and all those things with my releases, but now I get to go and find artists that I really love and like and share them with the world too.

I was worried that I, the artist Morimura, would have conflicts with the participating artists and develop a strenuous relationship with them. But the actual experience was completely the opposite. The artists accepted my requests rather positively, because it came from a fellow artist. I strongly feel that the fact that my being an artist avoided the usual curator vs artist tension, and led to creating a positive atmosphere as well as developing a solidarity amongst artists and building a community for artists.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

It's important to show the new generation that soundtracks can be just as exciting as traditional albums if put in the hands of the right curator.

The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together.

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.

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.

The real problem with the art world is not the money men scavenging in its wake - they've always been there - but the pirates who've taken over the ship. I am thinking, of course, of that awful art world species: the curator.

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.

Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It's hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.

It has been a great honor to serve the four campuses of the University of Missouri System in the role of curator, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity.

You get to be your own curator of your own exhibits inside.

We're the curator for the African-American experience for the past, present and future. That's my job.

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

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!

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

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.

Once you become a curator, you will inevitably end up on TV, if only to talk about your latest exhibition.

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

An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

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.

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

I've always being interested in clothes - and I'm also the curator of a significant dress collection with 12,000 objects in it - the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.

Images work on so many different levels. As a writer you feel them, try not to get in their way or narrow them down to anything other or less complex. A writer is a curator of sorts - once you've brought the images together you try to stand at a respectful distance and let them speak for themselves. Try not to mess with their ambiguities and contradictions. They are what they are, irreducible. This is their integrity.

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.

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.

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.

I've always wanted to play a role as a producer and a curator and to help make drag really have an epic scale and a large audience and a lot of interest.

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.

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

In big museums, the role of the curator has shrunk in recent years as different branches of curatorial work - such as interpretation, or learning, or conservation - have split off and become professions of their own.

The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving.

I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, 'Impurity.' Because that's it.

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.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.

I am not nostalgic for the past. And for me, being a museum curator was a childhood dream.

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.

I think that a lot of artists have succeeded in making what I might call "curator's art." Everybody's being accepted, and I always want to say, "Really? That's what you've come for? To make art that looks a lot like somebody else's art?" If I am thinking of somebody else's art in front of your art, that's a problem.

As a curator, I've met endless people who feel a 'special connection' with Anne Boleyn, or Victorian prostitutes, or various other unlikely candidates.

I've been in some biennales, and some I haven't. I always like the idea of how you meet the curator, hang out, and figure out who you want to work with.

My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.

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.

I am a museum curator when I am not on the television and in our collection at Kensington Palace we have a book like Marie Antoinette's, which belonged to the daughters of George III.

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.

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.

My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.

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.

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.