My mum was a dancer when she was a kid. Then my parents met and eventually had an art gallery; my dad taught himself how to frame pictures, and then he was a curator at an art gallery in the city I'm from. I'm an only child.
Ari Millen
I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around.
Bonnie Raitt
With YouTube - with the Internet in general - you have information overload. The people who don't necessarily get credit are the curators.
Chad Hurley
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
Chris Abani
I'd call my work 'instinctual design.' I like to find the spirit of a piece that defies time, age, and occasion. My clothes give the wearer the chance to develop their own voice within a wardrobe, and I think of them as curators of their personal style.
Chris Benz
My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.
Cornelia Parker
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.
David Rockefeller
I play a curator, the most American part you can think of. My work is to protect the Declaration of Independence. I work at the National Archives in Washington.
Diane Kruger
Labels are curators of taste, and the best ones know how to monetize what an artist is trying to do.
El-P
I don't really understand why people are so interested in me, personally. I'm just a curator. I'm just telling people things I think are cool.
Elise Andrew
Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.
Ethan Zuckerman
I see a curator as a catalyst, generator and motivator - a sparring partner, accompanying the artist while they build a show, and a bridge builder, creating a bridge to the public.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality.
My job is art curator, not artist. All I have ever wanted to do is immerse myself in art, to enjoy it, to learn about it, to write about it, to talk to others about it.
It's quite an obscure notion for a kid, no? To want to be a curator. But even then, I knew that I would do this.
Since 2000, I've been based in Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it's a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.
I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.
Iris Apfel
I'm happy to be content-maker as well as curator, so I'm happy to also be a presenter for amazing things.
Jason Silva
Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties.
Jerry Saltz
I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.
When money and hype recede from the art world, one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.
I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy.
I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
As I made my way through 'On Line,' the austere, stridently dogmatic, sometimes revelatory exhibition 'about line' at MoMA, I found myself thinking, 'Someone please wake me when the seventies are over!' In the empire of curators, the sun never sets on the seventies. It is the undead decade.
The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.
Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.
I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.
People may be due the benefits of a democratic electoral process. But in the United States, content curators appropriately have a First Amendment right to present their content as they see fit.
The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving.
I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.
We're the curator for the African-American experience for the past, present and future. That's my job.
It is great to know that the lives and careers of country music's artists are being documented through the Hall of Fame's expert archival and curatorial resources.
Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.
Artists who take on curatorial activities have the advantage of negating the professional hurdles and limitations comprising institutions.
Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.
It's important to show the new generation that soundtracks can be just as exciting as traditional albums if put in the hands of the right curator.
Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It's hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.
Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.
14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness.
I did two years at art school in criticism and curatorial practice, but I dropped out because I was frustrated that there was this hierarchy where I couldn't do anything or ask questions.
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
If the Bible is correct, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that means there were no dinosaurs, and museum curators have been messing with us. Or the dinosaurs were here, and we never noticed them. Or a lot of people saw them but didn't want to say anything.
I've always wanted to play a role as a producer and a curator and to help make drag really have an epic scale and a large audience and a lot of interest.
I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, 'Impurity.' Because that's it.
There are about 250 curators in the world who keep their eyes open to choose films from around the globe for festivals. I am one of them.
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.
If we imagine that the only right that we have is to make commodifiable objects, then we limit our practice, and we limit the great potential for an understanding between collectors, curators and galleries.
