Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-or...dinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized?... A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a ...monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 sl...ave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The museum is full of interesting things. All kinds of paintings are there. And then paintings too thick to put in a frame, that t...hey call sculpture. And then there are spectators. with their scorecards, rooting for culture. And spectators of the spectators, looking for love's introduction. And art students taking notes. And old women trying to remember the past. And old men with too much to forget. And tourists, thinking that a museum represents a city. And loafers so poor, they study their soberness here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is... recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew, massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Caesar Borgia, Marat, Lopez; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, patricides, matricides and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What's the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... ...can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »