Art Museum Quotes

To view a museum only as a repository for history is to miss half the picture. The temperature of an art institution is found in the people who work within it.

This page compiles captions from museum staff, artists, and collaborators, offering a look at the challenges of what became the model for the white room to the gallery space:

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Andrea Fraser

Artist
"The US has become a plutocracy, and its museums have effectively become pay-to-play country clubs for millionaires."
✒ Book "Museums, Money, and Politics" 2016

Ben Luke

Critic & broadcaster
"Museums need to press the reset button and become more radical."
✒ Art Critic and Podcaster Source: The Art Newspaper 2025

Edmond De Goncourt

19th-century writer and critic

"A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world."

✒ Goncourt Journal 1850-1870

Hans Haacke

Artist
"Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines."
✒ Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere 1998

Juan Ignacio Entrecanales

Ingenior

"Museums are no longer passive guardians of the past, but dynamic, forward-looking institutions that adapt to new realities."

✒ ACCIONA Living & Culture Summit 2025

 Justine Ludwig

Curator and writer
"When you are a woman or a person of color and you go to an art museum and you don't see work by artists who represent you, it becomes clear that you are not afforded the same opportunities."
✒ interview Spike art magazine / Kevin Ruben Jacobs • photo Nik Kuman

Just Stop Oil

Activist group

"What is worth more, art or life? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?"

✒ Just Stop Oil activists, National Gallery protest, London 2022

Stefan Kalmár

Curator
“The museum director of today is busier soliciting funds and generating commercial revenue while manoeuvring often conflicting interests than actually thinking about the civic purpose of their own organisation. This situation was never a choice of our own making, but the conflicting interests and economical demands at play in contemporary arts organisations have resulted in some bizarre institutionalised antagonisms—tearing the public sector apart from the inside, moving us further away from our civic role and founding principles—at exactly the moment when we are needed most.”
✒ London's Institute of Contemporary Arts director - The Art Newspaper 2019

The Goods

“ These places might not feel like real museums and instead more like a trendy fad with ball pits, but right now they're shaping how to consume art. In these pop-up museums, the room and you are the centerpiece. So that's what makes it Instagramable, is that you are immersed in the actual art.”
✒ The Goods s01e01 - VOX
YouTube - How "Instagram traps" are changing art museums