The British Museum plans to build computer re-constructions of the Elgin Marbles – is this the first step towards having a copy so that they can hand back the originals to where they belong?

From:
The Times

February 05, 2004
Laser technology will recreate Elgin Marbles
By Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

THE British Museum has ambitious plans to construct a replica of the Elgin Marbles, recreating their original look in painted colours.

Hundreds of fragments of the Parthenon’s sculptures, scattered across ten museums in eight countries, are to be brought together in a computerised mapping exercise that could eventually lead to a physical replica in marble.
Read the rest of this entry »

Scotland’s Museums may be among institutions to benefit if a reciprocal loan agreement is made with Greece when the Elgin Marbles are returned.

From:
Evening Times (Glasgow)

Trade bid to return the Elgin Marbles
5th February 2004
Gordon Thomson

GLASGOW’S museums may be chosen to display priceless antiquities if a campaign to re-home the Elgin Marbles succeeds.

The news comes ahead of a campaign to return the ancient sculptures to Greece.
Read the rest of this entry »

A decision by the Royal Armouries in Leeds has suggested that it is perfectly acceptable for museums to make long term loans – under certain circumstances. This makes one wonder why the British Museum has still never seriously discussed any loan proposals table by Greece int he past.

From:
The Times

Opinion
February 02, 2004
Bagpipes or the barber of Seville?
By Richard Morrison

[…]

GUNS YES, MARBLES NO

BRITAIN’S oldest national museum, the Royal Armouries, has never recovered from its misguided move from the Tower of London to somewhere off the Leeds ring-road. Now, with Government approval, it has devised a most peculiar stunt to supplement its £6 million annual subsidy. It is sending 270 weapons on free loan to a new gun museum being set up in Kentucky by a rich American arms collector. Such is the obsession with guns in the United States that the Armouries is confident that, in return, it will attract large donations from pistol-fixated Americans.
Read the rest of this entry »

Does the Universal Museum of the Enlightenment really exist? Or are items such as the Elgin Marbles or the Rosetta Stone just isolated artefacts in a collection? Neil MacGregor would like the world to believe that it does exist – in many cases the way artefacts are presented does not concur with this – nor for that matter is it the undisputed best way in which a museum should be structured.

From:
International Herald Tribune

Rediscovering the Enlightenment
Alan Riding NYT
Saturday, January 31, 2004

LONDON Museums usually present art, artifacts and antiquities in ways intended to heighten the aesthetic pleasure of visitors. Even at the British Museum, which pioneered the idea of the universal museum, there is the temptation to look at such treasures as the Elgin Marbles or the Rosetta Stone as isolated objects.

But the museum has turned back the clock to when it stood at the vanguard of the search for knowledge in the mid-18th century. Last month, climaxing celebrations of the museum’s 250th birthday, Prince Charles inaugurated a renamed and refurbished Enlightenment Gallery, which offers a selection of objects of the kind that inspired 18th-century scientists to explore the secrets of nature, archeology, antiquity and primitive peoples.
Read the rest of this entry »