The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.
Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It's a place you can come to escape, where there's authenticity, there's uniqueness, there's calm, there's physicality.
I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.
A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
If you see a wonderful archaic Greek marble object in a museum, it's not only that it's beautiful, but what comes to your mind is the fact that it's 2,600 or so years old, and it was done by a human being at that time who you have such a limited ability to grasp - and yet you have this enormous ability to grasp.
Museums are like sports stadiums, hotels and hospitals: they are in the category of captive-audience dining.
I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.
Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.
Museums provide places of relaxation and inspiration. And most importantly, they are a place of authenticity. We live in a world of reproductions - the objects in museums are real. It's a way to get away from the overload of digital technology.
There are no such things as the Elgin Marbles.