The New Acropolis Museum celebrated its first birthday on 20th June. With over two million visitors in this time, it has rapidly become one of the destinations on the must see list for tourists in Athens. It has raised awareness of the Parthenon Marbles significantly, as the casts of them in the Parthenon Gallery now make it very clear how many of the sculptures are in the British Museum.

From:
Athens News Agency

06/23/2010
New Acropolis Museum celebrates first anniversary

More than two million people have visited the new Museum of the Acropolis during its first year of operation, according to figures presented by the museum to mark the first anniversary since it first opened to the public on June 20, 2009.

The museum’s board chairman Prof. Demetris Pandermalis said the museum received a total of 2,010,641 visitors in that time, had set research and scientific goals, made progress in the area of conservation and also in educational programmes.
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The new edition of Mary Beard’s Book – The Parthenon, has various changes, particularly in relation to the New Acropolis Museum which was still in the early stages of construction when the first edition was published.

The Parthenon (Wonders of the World)
Author: Mary Beard
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 1861973012

From:
Lancashire Evening Post

Book review: The Parthenon by Mary Beard
By Pam Norfolk
Published on Fri May 28 15:07:23 BST 2010

Travellers have braved wars and bandits to see it, politicians and superstars have competed to be photographed in front of it and some of the world’s greatest artists and designers have been inspired by it…

The ancient Parthenon in Athens has been a centre of pilgrimage since it was built over 2,500 years ago and its stunning architectural beauty has never failed to disappoint the millions of visitors.
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Matthew Parris in The Times has (although I am still hoping the remarks were made tongue in cheek) sadly descended to the level of many other commentators in the past, who claim that London is a far safer location for the display of the Parthenon Marbles. Notwithstanding any other issues associated with this argument, the fact remains that even the supposedly safe places can become unsafe – meaning that there is no form of guarantee that London is any safer than Athens for the display of artefacts. This fact is evidence by such things as the huge number of artworks destroyed in the collapse of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001.

If the argument is taken to its logical conclusion, then surely all artefacts should be located in secure underground vaults – perhaps only viewable by video cameras. If this was the case though, it should be determined by some sort of international body, by the voluntary consent of the parties concerned, not post-rationalised bay a single party without any sort of real consent from the original owners.

From:
The Times

May 20, 2010
Never mind the oil slick, just watch our carpet
BP should take a wider view when it comes to health and safety
Matthew Parris

[...]

Losing their Marbles

Speaking of mayhem, I see a silver lining to the cloud of rioting and destruction in Athens. I’ve always felt that there was merit in the argument that, as the Elgin Marbles were part of the Parthenon, they should be reunited with it, but I’m equally impressed with the argument that they were brought to Britain for safekeeping, and are ours now. It is at last clear how these two may be reconciled. Bring the Parthenon to London, too, for safekeeping.

[...]

I’m fairly unconvinced by the viewpoint represented in this article. The argument is never about where the impact of the Parthenon Marbles is greater, but about where they actually belong & who they belong to.

From:
New York Times

Abroad
Who Draws the Borders of Culture?

Swarms of visitors see the Elgin marbles daily in the British Museum. The Greeks want them moved to a new museum near the Parthenon, but would their impact be greater there?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 4, 2010

IT was gridlock in the British Museum the other morning as South African teenagers, Japanese businessmen toting Harrods bags, and a busload of German tourists — the usual crane-necked, camera-flashing babel of visitors — formed scrums before the Rosetta Stone, which Egyptian authorities just lately have again demanded that Britain return to Egypt. From the Egyptian rooms the crowds shuffled past the Assyrian gates from Balawat (Iraq is another country pleading for lost antiquities) and past the Roman statue of the crouching Aphrodite (ditto Italy), then headed toward the galleries containing what are known in Britain as the Elgin marbles (but in Greece as the Parthenon marbles, or simply booty), where passers-by plucked pamphlets from a rack.
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It is now nearly a year since the New Acropolis Museum opened in Athens. This museum has led to a big increase for the visitor figures to museums in Greece – hopefully once the newness wears off its popularity will continue.

From:
Agence France Presse

Greece museum visitors increase by 40 percent
(AFP) – Apr 12, 2010

ATHENS — The number of visitors to Greek museums jumped by 41 percent last year compared to 2008, whilst fewer made trips to its archaeological sites, the national statistics service said Monday.

The hike in visitor numbers to 2,813,548 was largely due to the opening of a new Acropolis museum in Athens that brought in over 800,000 people.
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Victoria University School of Architecture in Wellington, New Zealand, has produced ten scale models of various aspects of the Parthenon. These are now being shipped to Athens for display in the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Stuff (New Zealand)

Parthenon heads from Wellington to Athens
By MIKE WATSON – The Dominion Post

One of the world’s most recognisable buildings has been cut down to size by a Wellington architectural lecturer in models to be exhibited in Athens.

Ten models depicting sculptures and detailed sections of the Parthenon and Acropolis have been made by Victoria University School of Architecture and Design lecturer Jeni Mihova, and graduates Jordan Wisniewski and Matt Fraser.
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This review seems to like some bits of the New Acropolis Museum, but not others. I guess I shouldn’t have expected unequivocal praise from a site called Grumpy Traveller. In some ways, its liking of the interior far more than the exterior echoes the comments Mary Beard made last year.

From:
Grumpy Traveller

Athens, Greece: Review of the new Acropolis Museum
David Whitley has mixed feeling on Bernard Tschumi’s new showcase for the treasures of the Parthenon.

New Acropolis Museum in Athens

If ever something was on a hiding to nothing, it’s the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. It cost EUR130 to build, is designed to hold many of Greece’s most important national treasures and is already being promoted as a tourism flagship.

Naturally, the critics had a field day before it was even opened. Some pointed to the cost, some to the position at the foot of the Acropolis rather than on it, others to the fact that a Swiss architect – Bernard Tschumi – was employed rather than a Greek.
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The British Museum (& most state / local authority owned museums in the UK), often stand behind the screen of anti-deaccessioning regulations, using these as an excuse to avoid restitution claims, stating that there is no point even entering into discussion, as they would not be allowed to return the artefacts if they did want to. In many countries though, deaccessioning is far less of a problem & can be relatively commonplace, as evidenced that the International Council of Museums publishes specific guidelines on the subject.

The guidelines are in fact published for the entirely different reason, that recently, a number of US art collections have tried to sell off large chunks of their collections. Therefore, it is clear that deaccessioning, while not perhaps legally regulated, should have clear ethical guidelines in place for institutions to sign up to as they wish – on the other hand, this is a completely different thing to outlawing the practice altogether.

From:
Eflux

Museum deaccessioning:
April 4, 2010
International Committee of ICOM for Museum and Collections of Modern Art

The International Council of Museums
General Principles on Conditions of Deaccession from Museum Collections

http://www.cimam.org

GENERAL PRINCIPLES ON CONDITIONS OF DEACCESSION FROM MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

Ethical codes must evolve in response to the evolving nature of standards and practices in museums and in society, and need to be periodically reviewed, discussed and updated.

In view of recent controversial practice with regard to selling art from museum collections, CIMAM states its opposition in the first instance to the notion of deaccession. In those instances where deaccession is deemed defensible or necessary, CIMAM’s General Assembly adopts the following set of principles for the conditions of deaccession, and urges the directors of member institutions to accept these principles as guidelines for their institutions.
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Although it is now more than six months since the official opening of the building, positive reviews of the New Acropolis Museum keep on coming. This review is from an architectural specification magazine, hence the focus on the materials that the building is constructed from.

From:
Specifier (Australia)

Issue 189
The New Acropolis Museum by Bernard Tschumi
Writer: Robbie Moore

In mid-2007, the Old Acropolis Museum shut its doors. Its collection of giants and centaurs, metopes, pediments and parts of the Parthenon Frieze, were wrapped in plastic shrouds and packed in reinforced wooden boxes, and hauled into the air over Athens. The artworks, some weighing two and a half tonnes, were passed between Europe’s three largest lifting cranes on their way to their new, €130 million home. Now, two years later, the New Acropolis Museum – one of the most significant and frankly political cultural projects of the last decade – has finally opened its doors.

The New Acropolis Museum is as much about the artifacts it’s missing as about the artifacts it holds. Its top-floor gallery, rotated 23 degrees to align with the Parthenon, makes a plain and eloquent case for the return of the Elgin Marbles. The gallery contains a small number of real pieces from the Parthenon, alongside replicas of artifacts taken two hundred years ago by Lord Elgin and now residing in the British Museum. The replicas were not given a fake weathered patina, but were left a perfect, toothpaste white. The contrast with the ancient stones is striking, and deliberate. This is a memorial as much as a museum, mourning a loss.

The architect of the New Acropolis Museum, Bernard Tschumi, is a supporter of the cause. His design destroys an argument used by the British since the 1970s, that Athens was too polluted with smoke and sulphur dioxide to look after the marbles. Athens’ air had already improved with the new metro system and the pedestrianisation of the historic district, but Tschumi further protects the museum’s antiquities with a sophisticated, highly controlled micro-environment. The Caryatids, for instance, were sealed behind glass in the Old Acropolis Museum, but here stand free. The interior conditions are easily preferable to those in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles are surrounded by four walls and lit from above by diffuse daylight and spotlights, while the New Acropolis Museum’s Parthenon Gallery is open on all sides to the unblinking Greek sun. The works can be viewed, therefore, in the conditions they were intended. “Now that the building is finished and everybody will be able to see the quality of light that you get here”, Tschumi told Wallpaper*, “and the way they will be displayed here compared to the way they are displayed in the British Museum, the return [of the Elgin Marbles] will make sense straight away”.
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Constantine Sandis looks back at the issue of the Parthenon Sculptures following the opening of the New Acropolis Museum. The New Acropolis Museum is compared to the British Museum’s concept of the universal museum, showing that both museums exhibit universalism, but in different forms. More importantly though, he asks whether both sides have lost site of the true issue of what is best for the sculptures.

From:
The Liberal

The New Acropolis
by Constantine Sandis

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved,
To guard those relics ne’er to be restored.
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto XV, 3-6.

Last summer, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens opened its gates, not only to the public but also to a flood of arguments and emotions old and new. The root cause of this commotion lies in the fact that nearly half of the sculptures which originally graced the Parthenon have been residing in the British Museum, ever since they were purchased from the bankrupt Lord Elgin in 1816. Numerous smaller fragments, it is often forgotten, are kept by other museums across Europe.
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Professor Dimitrios Pantermalis is visiting Nicosia next week to give a lecture about the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Cyprus Mail

President of Acropolis Museum in Cyprus
Published on February 17, 2010

PRESIDENT of the New Acropolis Museum, archaeologist Dimitrios Pantermalis, will visit Cyprus next week and will give a lecture in Nicosia.

According to an announcement issued by the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, which is organising the lecture, Pantermanis will speak on the New Acropolis Museum, its Architecture and its Exhibition Programme.

More positive coverage of the New Acropolis Museum which opened last year.

From:
Flavorwire

The Acropolis Goes Modern
1:01 pm Monday Jan 25, 2010 by Kelsey Keith

After inevitable delays — including the discovery of an ancient Athenian city under the building site — The New Acropolis Museum is open for business, packing in visitors to the historic but semi-rundown neighborhood of Makrygianni in Athens. The thoughtful design by former Columbia architecture dean Bernard Tschumi and team positions the 226,000 square foot museum over the footprint of the long-ruined city; the exhibition space — ten times larger than that of the previous edifice — provides what could someday be a permanent home for the hotly contested Elgin Marbles and other looted artifacts. Hellenic architecture porn after the jump.

Bernard Tschumi Architects won the bid in 2001 in a design competition chaired by Santiago Calatrava; their winning plan “created a deliberately non-monumental structure whose simple and precise design invokes the mathematical and conceptual clarity of ancient Greek architecture” while establishing a dialogue between the museum’s exhibition spaces and the existing Acropolis buildings.