The Imaginary Museum Quotes

“[…] Notions of what ‘belongs’ to a culture have been complicated by globalization and exchange.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“And it’s perhaps late in the day to admit that I don’t recognize art as a dead category capable of definition at all, but as the human urge to express our position in relation to a universe electrified by consciousness.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“By so explicitly politicising [… works,] you’re making it impossible for the visitor to understand them on their own terms[.]”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“It’s a mistake to assume that because a painting might look more like a work of art from the past that it must share the same principles.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“[…] the fictional spaces in which paintings happen aren’t perfectly sealed off from the world.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“This is what we mean, I think, when we say carelessly that a work of art is ‘timeless.’ Not that an artwork encodes some single abiding truth that a priestly class can discern, but rather that it rewards different interpretations as the world changes around it.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“Indeed, it’s easier to conclude that ‘the only definition of art,’ as the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth put it, ‘is art.’ Which is another way of saying that art is not a theory, it’s an activity. And, by extension, that art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“[…] the history of art is not a long line of masterpieces stretching back hundreds of years but an evolving dialogue - with other works of art, with society, with the history of ideas, with other people - in which everyone should feel able to participate.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“The art critic Robert Hughes pointed out that if you were to take the pile of bricks that compromises Carl Andre’s minimalist sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966) out of the museum and place it in a parking lot, it would no longer be a work of art but a neat stack of building materials. If you were to put a sculpture by Rodin in a parking lot, by contrast, it would be a ‘misplaced’ work of art. Hughes was emphasizing that the Rodin is identified as art by its form, while the Andre (which Hughes also admired) is identified as art by the idea behind it. For all that I have issues with this tendency to draw battle lines between form and content, to trust in the aura of an artwork and to assume that art should be found in museums and never parking lots, it does identify a useful distinction: a large part of the contemporary art I like does not aspire to independence from the everyday world but to alert us to it.”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Ben Eastham, The Imaginary Museum