“If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn’t last very long. I can’t go to a museum – I’ll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of… it’s sort of like a domino effect.”
“Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.”
“I think about that all of the time and I have this fantasy that I am going to work at a museum someday! I would love to do something like that!”
“An art book is a museum without walls.”
“It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.”
“I’ll be giving a speech at the randomest place, like a bank or something, and a guy in a suit will say, ‘I’m totally freaked out that I’m talking to the girl from ‘Cremaster.’ For the rest of my life, that movie will be playing in a museum somewhere. I never could have expected that huge response.”
“I went to an exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called ‘The Ten Beauties of Shanghai’.”
“The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century – it was actually mummified, skin and all – but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.”
“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.”