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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.

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.

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.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

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.

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point.

Museums are good things, places to look and absorb and learn.

I love museums but I don't want to live in one.