Reebok is creating a sculpture of Swedish heptathlete Carolina Kluft posed to match one of the figures on the Parthenon Frieze. This sculpture will be used as part of Reebok’s advertising campaign during the Olympics in Athens this summer.

From:
The Independent

31 March 2004 13:53
Athletics: Kluft cast in a classical pose on road to Athens
By Mike Rowbottom

Something unusual happened at yesterday’s publicity appearance in London by the world heptathlon champion, Carolina Kluft. The flaxen-haired darling of the Swedish nation and wider sporting world produced a false smile.

In the circumstances, it was forgivable – the circumstances being that she was standing spotlit on a stage surrounded by television cameramen, photographers and reporters all striving to appear neutral about the fact that another woman was daubing her body with purple-coloured liquid rubber.
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Despite many people’s hopes that the Acropolis restoration might be completed by the start of the Athens Olympics, the works are currently nowhere near to the stage where they can remove the scaffolding that currently enshrouds the building.

From:
Kathimerini (English edition)

Wednesday March 24, 2004
Acropolis to keep its braces

The most famous building on the Acropolis will still be partially obscured by scaffolding during the August Olympics, while half of another important temple on Greece’s top tourist attraction will be missing, officials admitted yesterday.

During a visit yesterday to the ancient citadel, where a massive and painstaking conservation project is under way on the Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike and the Propylaea, Deputy Culture Minister Petros Tatoulis was given an outline of the time schedules involved.
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Theodoros Pangalos, the former Culture Minister of Greece has called for the current deputy minister, Petros Tatoulis to resign because of the lawsuit he filed intending to stall the construction of the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Kathimerini (English edition)

Tuesday March 23, 2004
Ex-minister calls for resignation of current deputy over museum suit

PASOK deputy and former Culture Minister Theodoros Pangalos yesterday called for the resignation of the current deputy culture minister, Petros Tatoulis, for his having lodged a suit — before he entered the Cabinet — against officials involved in plans to build the new Acropolis Museum. The charges were linked with the alleged destruction of antiquities to allow preliminary construction work. “Now Tatoulis is ordering his own legal advisers to fight the suit which he himself lodged,” Pangalos declared in Parliament.

A project is underway to create high quality digital scans of all the Parthenon sculptures. The intention of this exercise is so that pieces in different museums can be seen together virtually without them ever actually leaving the museums.
To me this sounds too much like a way for institutions such as the British Museum to try & strengthen their argument, by offering to return virtual copies rather than the actual artefacts themselves.

From:
BBC News

Last Updated: Tuesday, 23 March, 2004, 10:01 GMT
New life for old Elgin Marbles?

One of the greatest artworks of all time is scattered in fragments across Europe. But there is now a way to view the surviving Parthenon sculptures together for the first time – a virtual reconstruction.

They’re still magnificent nearly 2,500 years after being carved, but the sculptures of the Parthenon are a bit like sad ghosts – pale, battered, half-lost and spread far and wide.
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Debate on the Parthenon Marbles continues – with many different opinions.

From:
Star Ledger (New Jersey)

Crusade calls for art’s return
Amid Olympic fervor, Britain entreated to give back Greek masterpieces
Sunday, February 29, 2004
BY REBECCA GOLDSMITH
For the Star-Ledger

LONDON — When a British ambassador pried some 70 tons of sculpture from the walls of the Parthenon in the early 1800s to decorate his Scottish estate, Athens was a remote outpost of the Ottoman Empire.

Greece did not exist as an independent country. And ancient treasures around the world belonged to anyone important and rich enough to cart them away.
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