In stark contrast to the rigid anti-deaccessioning policies of institutions such as the British Museum, University College London is asking the public to give their views on which of the items in their collection should be sold off to free up space for new artefacts.

From:
Time

London Museum Asks Public What to Pitch
By Gaëlle Faure / London
Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009

If you’re the type of person who has trouble throwing anything out, then the job of collections reviewer at the University College London’s museums might not be for you. The college is embarking upon a purge of its assorted collections, some 250,000 items in total, only 2% of which are currently on display. A gargantuan task, surely, but the college is not doing it on its own — officials have taken the unusual step of opening the process up to the public. They’re asking visitors what they should keep, what they should give away to other museums — one institution’s trash is another’s treasure — or, as a last resort, what they should just throw away.

“Disposal is still a dirty word. Most museum people are too scared to use it,” says Jayne Dunn, UCL’s collections manager. “We work for the public, but no one’s ever thought of asking them what they want.”
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Dimitrios Pantermalis has given a lecture on the New Acropolis Museum at Columbia University, to coincide with their current exhibition.

From:
Athens News Agency

Lecture on New Acropolis Museum in NY

New York (ANA-MPA/P. Panagiotou) — Dimitrios Pandermalis, President of the Board of Directors of the New Acropolis Museum and Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, presented a lecture on “the Acropolis Museum and Its Collections” on Saturday evening at Columbia University in New York, in Schermerhorn Hall at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

Pandermalis made a historic review of the landmarks in the search for the appropriate site for the New Acropolis Museum, the obstacles that arose along the way, the excavations that necessitated a change of plan, and the final result that he said enchanted humanity.
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Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition of architecture & archaeology that relates to the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Bernard Tschumi, the architect of the New Acropolis Museum was previously Dean of the School of Architecture at Columbia University.

From:
Columbia Spectator

New museum in Athens inspires exhibit at Wallach Gallery
“The New Acropolis Museum” incorporates architectural models, casts of classical Greek pottery and sculpture, and rare books and prints in Wallach Gallery.
By Kat Balkoski
Published Tuesday 10 November 2009 07:17pm EST.

“It is my profound belief that an exhibition in an educational institution should do more than please the eye and present ‘originals,’” said Ioannis Mylonopoulos, a professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and curator of “The New Acropolis Museum,” on view at the Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

The exhibit contains little in the way of what would traditionally be considered “fine art”—instead, it incorporates architectural models, casts of classical Greek pottery and sculpture, and rare books and prints from Columbia’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. This selection of media gives the impression that the exhibit is more focused on the work that goes into the creation of art spaces and art appreciation than on art itself.
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An art installation in Melbourne aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, along with other repatriation cases around the world.

From:
GRReporter

Black Parthenon magic
14 July 2009 :: 11:28:19

A mourning installation appeared in Melbourne in the beginning of July, called “The Black Parthenon.” With the help of a black canvas in chiaroscuro lighting and quirked in a way, which resembles the original Athenian Acropolis, the Greek origin artist Konstantinos Dimopoulos expressed his support for the return of the Parthenon marbles back to Athens.

During the day the black tone installation looks like a funeral alter, which symbolizes the feeling of loss. The author dedicates it to all countries, who have become a subject of cultural-historic heritage theft. During the night, the installation is lid in bright blue and white tones, which make the Black Parthenon stand out and its silhouette reminds of the real Acropolis.
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The Skulpturhalle in Basel is hosting an exhibition about the New Acropolis Museum with the support of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture.

From:
Athens News Agency

11/5/9
Skulpturhalle Basel hosts Acropolis Museum exhibition

An exhibition promoting the New Acropolis Museum in Athens will open at Skulpturhalle Basel, Switzerland, on May 12, part of an initiative by the Hellenic Foundation for Culture (HFC).

The exhibition focuses on the excavations conducted on the spot where the new museum stands today, some 400 metres from the Acropolis, and serve as a pre-opening of the New Acropolis Museum next month. The exhibition is organised by the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum (OANMA).
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The Cyrus Cylinder will return to Iran temporarily – but only in exchange for numerous Iranian artefacts being lent to the British Museum. Whilst such reciprocal lending agreements can increase mobility of museum collections, at the same time, the fact that such an arrangement is entered into can legitimise the ownership of artefacts of disputed provenance.

From:
Far News Agency

2009-02-26
Cyrus Charter to Be Taken Home from UK

TEHRAN (FNA)- Officials from Iran National Museum are in talks with their counterparts from the British Museum to borrow the famous Charter of the Cyrus the Great for a few months to put it on public display at home.

Deputy chairman of Iran Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization Hamid Baqaee, told the Islamic republic news agency in London that Tehran was to transfer the baked-clay cylinder to Iran after finalizing the ongoing talks with the British Museum where is the house of the charter which is considered as the first human rights declaration.
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Despite attempts to publicise the fact that most classical Greek sculptures were originally coloured, in the eyes of the public, they are still very much perceived as pristine & white. Nowhere has this problem of misconstrued opinion been more apparent, than in the 1930s cleaning of the Elgin Marbles under the instruction of Lord Duveen.

A new exhibition in Germany hopes to change people’s understandings of the sculptures, with numerous coloured reconstructions to give people a better idea of how they might have originally looked.

From:
Artdaily

Friday, October 24, 2008
Gods in Color Opens at Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung

FRANKFURT.- Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung presents Gods in Color, on view through February 15, 2009. Antique marble sculpture was not white, but colored. This is amply and overwhelmingly attested to by ancient literary sources. Whereas the incontestable fact that ancient sculpture was colored was suppressed during the Italian Renaissance, it was recalled in the nineteenth century; in the twentieth century, it once again paled into insignificance, giving way to an aestheticism directed at clarity. Numerous traces of the original polychromy in antique sculpture have survived. They bear testimony to Greek and Roman statues having worn elaborately ornamented garments painted with precious pigments. Read the rest of this entry »

A new exhibition hosted in the Colosseum, traces how Italy learned the importance of protecting its heritage & the methods used to stop its destruction, beginning in the Renaissance & continuing to the present day.

From:
ANSA (Italy)

2008-10-03 15:36
Colosseum spotlights saved art
Exhibit shows how Italy learned to save its heritage

(ANSA) – Rome, October 3 – A new show at the Colosseum highlights Italy’s strong tradition in preserving its art heritage.

The exhibition, entitled Ruins and Rebirth of Art In Italy, shows how efforts to foil tomb raiders stretch from the Renaissance to the present day, culminating in the formation of Italy’s world-famous art cops, a Carabinieri unit which has worked in Iraq and other countries targeted by traffickers.
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Maurizio Fiorilli has in recent years been no stranger to restitution cases in his work for the Italian Government. Here he talks about some of the issues he is dealing with, as well as the way that the problems of looting are exacerbated by the policies of many of the museums that receive the stolen artefacts.

From:
Sunday Telegraph

Maurizio Fiorilli: scourge of the tomb raiders
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/08/2008

Bad news for the art thieves who for years have been selling Italy’s ancient treasures to foreign museums: ‘Il Bulldog’ is on your case. Alastair Smart meets the resolute attorney demanding their return

Pasquale Camera didn’t do light lunches. After a third plate of veal Napolitano, washed down by his nth glass of Barolo, the 25-stone ex-police captain galumphed his way out of a Naples restaurant, climbed into his Renault 21, and set off north for Rome. The August heat was intense, and just a few miles up the motorway, he fell asleep at the wheel, smashed into the guardrail and overturned his car. He died instantly.
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An exhibition about the New Acropolis Museum has been running in Beijing since February.

During July though, in the run up to the Olympics, many more exhibits were added & a catalogue was produced to explain about both the museum & some of its contents that were on display.

This catalogue (in English, Greek & Mandarin) can be downloaded from the New Acropolis Museum’s website here.

Museums of the west come up with many different explanations to justify why items in their collections should not be returned to the location where they were first (re)discovered. It is stated for instance that the The Code of Hammurabi in the Louvre should not be returned, as the location where it was (re)discovered in 1901 was not the location where it was originally created. This fact is true – the Code was created in Babylon in 1760 BC & at some point in the following six hundred years ended up in the Persian town of Susa. If we apply this rationale however, it is equally legitimate for someone else to take it from the Louvre today with no fear of reprisals. This on case is far from an isolated incident – the details may change in each case, but the overall attitude does not.

From:
Modern Ghana

BABYLON: MYTH AND TRUTH OR SUMMIT OF THE CULTURAL PROPERTY OF OTHERS?
By Kwame Opoku, Dr.
Mon, 11 Aug 2008

The striding and perhaps, growling, lion is surely an appropriate symbol for the power and influence of the three countries, France, Great Britain and Germany at the time that most of the valuable cultural objects were removed from Mesopotamia and other parts of the world.

The objective of the current exhibition (26 June – 5 October 2008) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, entitled “Babylon: Myth and Truth”, is, according to the official website, “to explore the myth of Babel and the true facts surrounding the ancient city of Babylon: two worlds – one exhibition”. (1) A related Babylon exhibition has already been held in Paris (14 March – 2 June 2008) and another one will be held in London (13 November 2008 – 15 March 2009). The legends and symbolism arising from the myths of Babylon – Sodom and Gomorrah, myths of unrestrained hedonism, Tower of Babel – linguistic multiplicity and confusion, imprisonment and racial oppression, are no doubt very interesting and important and will be discussed by many commentators on the exhibition.(2) Not all visitors to the exhibition may be aware that Bob Marley and the Wailers, echoing Rastafarian beliefs and reflecting the views of many Africans and people of African descent, designated as Babylon the oppressive economic system and political hegemony of the West:
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A new free exhibition has opened at Athen’s Eleftherios Venizelos Airport, to publicise the New Acropolis Museum. I actually stumbled on the exhibition by chance whilst passing through the airport before it officially opened. It tells enough to get visitors interested & to make them want to find out more, but unfortunately it is located in the area on an area where few people are likely to accidentally pass it. This is already the problem with the permanent exhibition about the archaeological finds made during the construction of the airport.

From:
Athens News Agency

05/29/2008
Exhibition on new Acropolis Museum

An exhibition on the construction and exhibits of the new Acropolis Museum was inaugurated at Athens international airport on Tuesday by Culture Minister Mihalis Liapis and Transport Minister Kostis Hatzidakis.

Entitled “The New Museum of the Acropolis – Soon a new destination” the exhibition gives visitors from every country a foretaste of the new museum that is expected to open its doors to the public in the autumn.
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