Museum Without Walls Quotes

“The two Mast Houses just within the Victory Gate of Portsmouth Dockyard are raised above the water on piloti. They are structures of remarkable grace, clinker-built, painted the palest green. They are vast, as they needed to be. Their survival is an industrial site devoted for a century to the servicing of mastless vessels is a matter for celebration. The use of which the more southerly is put is a matter for obloquy: the Mary Rose Shop is a repository of tawdry, insipid tat. It's the sort of stuff to make me wince- a dismal, timid inventory of mediocrity. Bad taste is forgivable. It's no taste which is so disheartening.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“The notion of severality of function is, regrettably, one that was gradually abandoned throughout the twentieth century because it did not accord with modernism’s puritanical espousal of ‘honesty’.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“The apocalyptic dystopias dreamed up by anti-urbanists were peopled by seething masses welded into the terrible organism of the mob, which is also a standard-issue subject of expressionism.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“Even when broaching the most familiar subjects – especially when broaching the most familiar subjects – we have always to be looking to illumine them in ways that make them seem unfamiliar, fresh, in ways that make us believe we have not seen them before.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls

“Régis Jauffret got it right when he said that he was disgusted by writers who think of their readers.”
― Jonathan Meades, Museum Without Walls