Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“I write for today. I don’t give a damn about writing for posterity.”

“One of the things I’ve learned is never to hoard ideas, because either they are not so relevant or they’ve gone stale. Whatever it is, pour it out.”

“Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”

For this ambitious inquiry, Grau traveled to Williamstown, New York City, Vienna, Oxford, Ampthill, Moscow, Berlin and London to speak to the people working behind the scenes in the Western world’s greatest museums. Focusing on the 1960s to the 2000s, Grau details the stories of these cultural institutions from the perspectives of those who know them.

“An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves.”

“When the nuns came to be blessed by the Patriarch, who on special holy days, went by my house in a motorboat, I detached the phallus of the horseman and hid it in a drawer. I also did this on certain days when I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was to ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions.”

“Even when he stands still, he moves. Baxter flickers everywhere and nowhere. A blink in a shuddering train window.”

“Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed—mysterious, uninviting.”

“All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.”

“I realize now, the older you get, the harder it is to be impressed because people make you feel ashamed of ever being impressed by anything at all. I kept many glowing remarks to myself because of this.”