Curator Quotes

Edward Lucie-Smith
Nicholas Serota

Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

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

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

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. Its billions of nerve cells - called neurons - lie in a tangled web that displays cognitive powers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to mimic it.

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

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

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.

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.

Collecting [fossils] is a lottery, differing from most lotteries, however, in that while some of the returns may be pretty small, there are few absolute blanks and some remarkably large prizes, and every collector hopes that it may fall to his lot to win one of these, and is willing to work long and arduously for the chance of obtaining it.