More than 850 million people will visit an American museum this year. That’s more than the combined attendance of every baseball, basketball, football and hockey game combined. Museums fill a unique niche by combining education and entertainment unlike any other place of gathering. First built as temples to the “muses” of Greek mythology, the original museums were filled with sculptures and scholars. In subsequent centuries, European monarchs seeking to display their spoils of war mimicked the Greek museums, creating great houses of treasure.
When the tradition came to the U.S., the motivation shifted from aggrandizement to education. The first museum to open in the United States was Charles Willson Peale’s Cabinet of Curiosities in Philadelphia, established in 1786. Peale wished to document the history of European discovery in the New World, displaying portraits of George Washington alongside the bones of wooly mammoths.
These days, there are more than 17,000 museums in the United States alone. Some are small, hyper-focused collections of curiosities — like the Potato Museum in Blackfoot, Idaho, or the Hand Fan Museum in Healdsburg, California — while others celebrate a wide array of art and scholarly achievement, paying homage to the intentions of the Greeks and their muses.
To share in the celebration of art and history, we’ve collected these 18 quotes about museums, each with its own unique take on the value of curated collections.
A visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives.
Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom.
The only way to understand painting is to go and look at it. And if out of a million visitors, there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves. People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in the church.
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life.
I go to a museum and see a painting someone living in the past has made, and I’m completely blown away. The nature of human beings has not changed. Everyone wants to avoid suffering and look for love.
Give me a museum, and I’ll fill it.
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.
Don’t go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you … and the world should begin to change for you.
That’s why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.
My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren’t as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.
A museum is a spiritual place. People lower their voices when they get close to art.
A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.
Shouldn’t a great museum foster serious seeing before all else?
My mother’s a genius … We would go to the art museum pretty much every Sunday, and I would watch her. She let me know that art was supposed to touch.
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
The world is a museum and we are the artist and critics.
Featured Image Credit: Daniel Robert/ Unsplash
April Dávila
April Dávila is a lover of words. Her debut novel "142 Ostriches" was released in 2020.
