Museums, Galleries

The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal. – G. K. Chesterton

The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. – Jean Cocteau

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum. – Edmond de Goncourt

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country. – Robert Hewison

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. – Henry James

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth. – Lewis H. Lapham

Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum. In it you find the same equivocal aspect, the same frozen quality. – Michel Leiris

Attitudes to museums have changed. If it had Marilyn Monroes knickers or Laurence Oliviers jockstrap they would flock to it. – Jonathan Miller

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. – Pablo Picasso