20th-century Curator Quotes

Edward Lucie-Smith
Nicholas Serota

This is a plea for patience. Your scepticism will gradually diminish and your fear will turn to love…All art was modern once.
To critics of modern art

Nicholas Serota
Nicholas Serota
There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the true work of art is that it is able to both contain and express different meanings - meanings which may in fact contradict each other.

Edward Lucie-Smith
Edward Lucie-Smith
A smile appears on the faces of most archaic figures, a happiness of expression seeming to transcend that of human beings.

The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.

Even if virtually anything can be art, there are levels of quality.

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out.

The nineteenth-century way of looking at the photograph was as a mirror for the memory, and at that time the photographs almost looked like mirrors, with their polished metallic surfaces.

Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.