Curator Quotes

Tailor your space to your needs. In one closet, I have upper and lower rods for skirts, pants and tops. The second is all shelves for bags and linens. In the third, there's just one rod for suits and dresses. To hang evening gowns, I use hooks on the ceiling.

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.

Grit is not just simple elbow-grease term for rugged persistence.

It is an often invisible display of endurance that lets you stay in an uncomfortable place, work hard to improve upon a given interest, and do it again and again.

Hominids typically haven't so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The science of psychiatry is now where the science of medicine was before germs were discovered.

As a child, our house had a backyard lined with roses tended vigilantly by my mother. So the fragrance fills me with nostalgia for my youth.

As the writer, you can choose the word that seems best in terms of meaning, nuance, sound, etc. As the translator you are unlikely to find a word in your language that exactly matches, so that you are always making a decision about which meaning or nuance to choose, or emphasize, over the others.

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end.

They are masters because they realize that there isn't one. On utterly smooth ground, the path from aim to attainment is in the permanent future.

We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do.

Perhaps we will one day be able at least to admit of a God possessing sufficient majesty and expansiveness to transcend the limits of our own imaginations and experience. But meanwhile, . . . we might do well to look upon the inadequacy of our concepts of God as the truest mirror of those limitations that define our condition.

Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer.

He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.

We are not interested in the unusual, but in the usual seen unusually.

I'm constantly making exhibitions in my head.

Wherever there is disaster, the newsman is there.

If he cannot find disaster, he searches for the odd and the peculiar, the exotic and the unfamiliar. His photographs, seen by millions, make momentary events and strange occurrences all over the world our common property.

The truth is, just to hear other people speaking Italian is really worth it.

It keeps the sound in your ear.

Behavior is ultimately the product of the brain, the most mysterious organ of them all.

When environments change, they usually do so pretty rapidly, at rates with which adaptation by natural selection would be hard put to keep up. When such change occurs, the quality of your adaptation to your old habitat is irrelevant, and any competitive advantage you might have had may be eliminated at a stroke.

The fundamental belief in the authenticity of photographs explains why photographs of people no longer living and of vanished architecture are so melancholy.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free.

I support [FRAME's] objectives, largely because I do not believe that results of tests conducted on animals will be neccessarily relevant to human beings.

The floating world is the realm of the graphic designer

What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure

Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.

To reach an audacious goal, we sometimes benefit from having it lie just beyond our grasp.

Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain what you never dreamed you could.

Mastery is in the reaching, not in the arriving.

Pain is not a punishment. And pleasure is not a reward. You could argue that failure is not punishment and Success is not reward. They're just failure and success. You can choose how you respond.

The pursuit of mastery is an ever-onward almost.

Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end.

A near win shifts our view of the landscape.

It can turn future goals, which we tend to envision at a distance, into more proximate events. We consider temporal distance as we do spatial distance. (Visualize a great day tomorrow and we see it with granular, practical clarity. But picture what a great day in the future might be like, not tomorrow but fifty years from now, and the image will be hazier.)

Play allows us to maintain curiosity while learning.

I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.

I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it.

I resist the temptation to curate my apartment.

Success is a label that the world confers on you, but mastery is an ever-onward 'almost.'

I tend to be kind of literal about translation.

I think it's important to present the writer as closely as possible.

I think it's important to be accurate on the level of the word, but it's also important to be accurate at the level of the sentence, at the level of the paragraph. Sometimes you lose sight of that - I remind myself to go back and read.

Mastery is in constantly wanting to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

The alternative to extinction is stagnation, and stagnation is seldom a good thing.

The present challenge to the photographer is to express inner significance through outward form.

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Over the years, photography has been to me what a journal is to a writer - a record of things seen and experienced, moments in the flow of time, documents of significance to me, experiments in seeing.

To have the translator be a figure in the book's presentation seems like a big thing, especially for a book that's really popular.

The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

I always hesitate to say that something is lifelike.

That's a huge subject - a writer refusing to do publicity but writing about publicity.