The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
David RockefellerRead
A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.
Interpretation
Museums must update their collections while still appreciating the value of classic works.
David Rockefeller emphasizes the importance of museums evolving by incorporating new pieces into their collections. However, he also stresses that this renewal should not come at the cost of neglecting significant historical works, as both new and old play vital roles in the cultural narrative of a museum.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech at an art gala highlighting the balance between old and new art.
The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.
Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you're not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half-century.
I realize how fortunate I have been; mine has been a wonderful life.
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. In order to appreciate cultures of another nation, one needs to go there, know the people and mingle with the culture of that country. One way to do that, if one is lucky enough, is to buy things from those cultures.
Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
Cartooning is preaching. And I think we have a right to do some preaching. I hate shallow humor. I hate shallow religious humor, I hate shallow sports humor, I hate shallowness of any kind.
Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
How I have walked... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!
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