Numerous sets of casts have been made of the Parthenon Frieze. Complete sets of casts are currently the only way to see the frieze in its entirety, as the majority of it is currently split between Athens & the British Museum.

From:
Scotsman

Monday, 15th September 2008
‘Worthless’ casts to receive £½m revamp

A COLLECTION of 200-year-old plaster casts, once considered near-worthless copies of great Greek and Roman statues and carvings, have earned a £494,000 lottery grant.
The cash will enable the Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) to conserve and restore them.

The casts have been used since the early 19th century as a teaching tool for students to practise drawing and painting. But they fell out of fashion with the advent of modern art programmes and were seen as having little intrinsic value.
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It is accepted by many, that the issue of the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum will be resolved once the British Museum realises that this is not a problem that is going to go away. One might question this, on the basis that people have been pressing for the sculptures return for some two hundred years already. The problem is, that in terms of the general public perception, the issue is currently below the radar – it surfaces every now & then, but doesn’t attract enough attention that it becomes an issue that needs to be resolved.

The impending opening of the New Acropolis Museum may well go a long way to solving this problem, as a permanent reminder of the issue to all who visit Athens. Moreover, the publicity that the museum is generating in the British Press, means that it has now reached the stage that it is mentioned in passing in other articles, rather than only in the articles specifically about the subject.

From:
The Times

September 5, 2008
Sorry Lord Coe, but Britain’s real art talents run rings round your official events
Tim Teeman, Arts & Entertainment Editor

[...]
The reopening of the Acropolis Museum in Athens this autumn will reignite the argument over whether Britain should return the Elgin Marbles. In December the Government is expected to publish the Heritage Protection Bill, the first for a generation, to streamline rules on listed buildings, ancient monuments and other national assets, giving English Heritage more powers to oversee the system and home owners a right of appeal against listing.
[...]

More coverage of Professor Vassilis Dimitriadis’s study on the validity of the Firman that supposedly allowed Lord Elgin to remove pieces of the Parthenon Sculptures from the Acropolis.

From:
Artinfo

Professor Questions Legality of Elgin Document
By ARTINFO
Published: August 29, 2008

LONDON—A professor from the University of Crete has called into question the sole document that the British Museum has found in recent years to support its legal ownership of the Elgin Marbles, reports the Times of London.
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Waldemar Januszczak has commented in the past on the controversial cleaning of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum in the 1930s. Here he looks at how seeing the original coloured versions of the sculptures as they first appeared would help to give us a greater understanding of their origins.

From:
The Times

From The Sunday Times
August 31, 2008
Waldemar Januszczak’s Sculpture Diaries
Waldemar Januszczak

[...]

Since sculpture has never had a Dark Age — and has never not been made — and because every society everywhere has always produced it, the BM has no more chance of covering the entire history of sculpture in its displays than I have in my short television series. But it has a go. Personally, I would love the museum to mount a display devoted to the colour of ancient sculpture that revealed how the Elgin Marbles were originally brightly painted. If the Elgin Marbles were as they should be, it would be so much easier to recognise the similarity that exists between them and, say, the African tribal sculpture from which they were descended.

[...]

More on the Ellinais followers ceremony on the Acropolis – again including incidental coverage of the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
International Herald Tribune

Ancient religion believers pray to Athena
The Associated Press
Published: August 31, 2008

ATHENS, Greece: Practitioners of the ancient Greek religion gathered among the ruined temples at the Acropolis Sunday, praying to Athena to stop the removal of sculptures and pieces of the temples to museums.

Participants claimed it was the first such gathering since the ancient religion was officially abolished late in the 4th century.
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The Greek Neo-pagans may have tenuous connection to the ancient Greeks. Their actions are however drawing a lot of media attention & on the back of this, more coverage is being given to the imminently opening New Acropolis Museum that it might not otherwise have received.

The followers of Ellinais object to the removal of sculptures from the Parthenon to preserve them from the elements – unfortunately though this has long been considered a necessary action by almost all archaeologists if they are to be preserved for future generations to see them.

More interestingly though, this article reveals information from a recent poll by Ipsos Mori, which shows that 69% of people in Britain believe that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece. This conveniently disproves the view put forward by the British Museum in a National Geographic film on the Elgin Marbles, which suggested that old polls were invalid because they were taken too long ago & there was no proof that support for reunification had been maintained over that time.

From:
Guardian

Greece: Pagans call on Athena to protect the Acropolis
Helena Smith in Athens
The Guardian,
Monday September 1 2008

Thrusting their arms skywards and chanting Orphic hymns, Greek pagans yesterday made a comeback at the Acropolis as they added their voices to protests against the imminent inauguration of the New Acropolis Museum.

Ignoring a sudden rainstorm and irate officials, white-clad worshippers gathered before Greece’s most sacred site and invoked Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to protect sculptures taken from the temples to the new museum. It was the first time in nearly 2,000 years that pagans had held a religious ceremony on the site.
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The Firman was an Ottoman legal document issued to Lord Elgin. It only survives in translation, but is used as the basis of proving the supposed legality of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon Sculptures from Athens. A historian who has researched this document & other similar documents is now casting doubt over whether the firman actually gave Elgin the permissions that were claimed.

From:
The Times

August 29, 2008
Legality of Earl of Elgin’s acquisition challenged by scholar
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

The new Acropolis Museum may prove to be the most lavishly appointed white elephant in history. Nothing will change the view of the British Government that the intended centrepiece, the magnificently sculpted Elgin Marbles, must remain permanently in the British Museum.

Not that the museum will be empty. There will be 4,000 exhibits including the remaining Parthenon sculptures. But the crown jewels, the 247ft of the original 524ft frieze, 15 of 92 metopes and 17 figures from the pediments, all dating to the 5th century BC, will remain 1,500 miles away in London.
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The Parthenon Gallery is in every sense the high point of a visit to the New Acropolis Museum. Even journalists who have initially been against the whole concept of the museum have come away awed by its creation of a suitable space for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
The Times

August 28, 2008
Athens welcomes the ghost of Phidias to new rooftop gallery
Marcus Binney, Architecture Correspondent

The new rooftop gallery built to display the Parthenon marbles is one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces in modern architecture.

Just as the Parthenon itself enjoys a 360-degree panorama of sparkling sea and green hills, the new ¤130 million gallery has a continuous view over the rooftops of Athens, interrupted only by the Acropolis itself. Sunlight fills the gallery through floor-to-ceiling glass, and the windows have such slender supports you might be standing in the open air enjoying blue skies and the crystal light which is the wonder of Attica.
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The New Acropolis Museum as a building may now be almost complete – however, it will not be complete as a museum until it is able to display all the surviving Parthenon Sculptures under its roof.

From:
Spectator

Acropolis now
Wednesday, 27th August 2008
Henry Sands says Athens’s new museum is missing its Marbles

We have come to understand that missing sections from museum displays of ancient sculpture are the inevitable result of parts breaking off and becoming lost to the world. But at the New Acropolis Museum in Athens we know exactly where to find the stones that would fill those accusatory gaps.

The empty spaces act as a poignant reminder to the viewer that the collection is not complete — and that it will remain incomplete as long as the Elgin Marbles sit in the Duveen Room of the British Museum, their home since 1816. Now that there is a place to show them off, there is new sense of optimism among the Greeks that they may finally be reunited with the Marbles they believe to be rightfully theirs.
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More on the historical novel Stealing Athena. If nothing else, books such as this raise awareness of the background of the Elgin Marbles & in many cases lead people to find out more about the subject.

Stealing Athena
Author: Karen Essex
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN: 0385519710

From:
Toronto Sun

Sun, August 17, 2008
Book in brief
By YVONNE CRITTENDEN

[...]

STEALING ATHENA
By Karen Essex
This intriguing novel by Karen Essex is based on a true story of obsession. It’s about the two ancient Greeks who developed the glory that is the Parthenon and the man who, centuries later, rescued — or stole, depending on one’s point of view — the best of the remaining marbles for his own country: England. Read the rest of this entry »

James Cuno wants trade in cultural properties to be a free market – because his institution would stand to gain from this, being relatively wealthy. Suffice to say, he arguments against Cuno’s reasoning have been covered many times already.

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage: Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
Author: James Cuno
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691137129

From:
Culture Kiosque

A HUMANIST PLEA FOR FREE-RANGING ANTIQUITIES
By Alan Behr
NEW YORK, 14 AUGUST 2008

There are few subjects in law more contentious than property rights, and when property stirs the emotions, there can be no end to the bickering. Divorce proceedings are notorious for that, as anyone knows who has ever battled a soon-to-be-ex-spouse to exhaustion over a sofa, clock or spaniel of no value or charm.

Nations can play that game too, and because they do it with antiquities, they are finding that the Zeitgeist is in their favor, reports James Cuno in his new book, Who Owns Antiquity? (Princeton University Press, 256 pages). Cuno is the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago — one of the encyclopedic art museums (to use Cuno’s phrase) that are the quiet protagonists of his book. They are the museums that, like bees ranging over a broad field, pollinate the world with the art, history and culture of its constituent regions. The Elgin Marbles were carved in Athens and the Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt, but they are now displayed at the British Museum, in London. The Pergamon Altar was built by the Greeks, removed from what is now Turkey and is on view in Berlin. I used to be able to take a ten-minute walk to The Metropolitan Museum to see the Euphronios krater , one of the finest surviving bowls of classical Greece, but I can’t do that anymore because it was packed off — not to Greece, but to Italy.
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In this interview, Bernard Tschumi makes it very clear that he believes that the Elgin Marbles will return to Athens, stating that the return will make sense to everyone once they see the facilities created within the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Wallpaper

Bernard Tschumi Q&A exclusive
Architecture
8 August 2008

After nearly 30 years of planning, and eight years since the international competition was launched for the project, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens is ready: the collections are carefully being moved in as we speak, and the official opening is expected with much anticipation towards the end of the year.

Proudly headed by architect Bernard Tschumi, the new museum project team also comprises local architect Michael Photiadis and the museum’s director Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, who showed us around the new bright and airy building, where we had the chance to meet Swiss-born Tschumi, and discuss his concept, the design, Athens and the Parthenon sculptures.
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