Showing results 109 - 120 of 120 for the tag: Museums.

December 1, 2008

The battle over stolen treasures from the ancient world

Posted at 1:48 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

Sharon Waxman’s new book seems now to have been reviewed in almost all the major news publications in the US – perhaps an indication of the current level of interest in the subject.

From:
San Francisco Chronicle

Nonfiction review: ‘Loot’ by Sharon Waxman
Reagan Upshaw, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, November 29, 2008

Loot
The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
By Sharon Waxman
Times Books; 414 pages; $30

The title, stamped in gold capital letters on the dust jacket, gives away the author’s agenda: This is a muckraking book about art objects from ancient cultures that have found their way into major museums of Europe and the United States. Sharon Waxman has a nose for scandal and spends much of the book following up on reports of thefts by grave robbers, smuggling by dealers and sexual hanky-panky between museum personnel.
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August 29, 2008

Athens’ new roof gallery

Posted at 12:52 pm in Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

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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August 11, 2008

Do free museums lead to devaluing of heritage

Posted at 1:14 pm in British Museum, Similar cases

This article is covers a number of interesting aspects. Gaza is in a situation where it has few museums & much of its heritage has been lost to collections in Israel, leading to the potential for many restitution requests in the future. More interesting though is the reasoning behind charging for admission – the British Museum always puts free entry as one of its top arguments in debates over the Elgin Marbles, but possibly Jawdat Khoudary is right – people don’t learn to value the heritage when they can see it for free. Certainly, many others have noted that free admission does tend to come at a price.

From:
Independent

The refuge that allows Gaza to reflect on past glories
By Donald Macintyre in Sudaniya, Gaza
Saturday, 9 August 2008

It may seem an odd dilemma in a territory where more than half of families live below an internationally defined poverty line, but Jawdat Khoudary is wondering whether there should be museum charges in Gaza.

As the owner and creator of the Strip’s first purpose-built archaeological museum, he has no doubt that the most prized patrons, the organised parties of schoolchildren already starting to flock to it, must come for free. And having sunk a small fortune – he won’t say how much – into building this elegant and air-conditioned space overlooking the Mediterranean just north of Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, he certainly isn’t trying to make money from it. But the 48-year-old owner of one of Gaza’s biggest construction companies worries that if he doesn’t charge a couple of shekels for individual entry, Gazans may not realise the value of their heritage as much as he does.
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June 5, 2008

New antiquity collecting guidelines released

Posted at 12:42 pm in Similar cases

More coverage of the acquisition guidelines for US museums, brought in largely to try & avoid repeats of some of the court cases that have occurred in recent years. These are however still only guidelines, so museums are free to ignore them & they don’t apply retroactively.

From:
Artinfo

New Guidelines for Collecting Antiquities
By ARTINFO
Published: June 4, 2008

NEW YORK—After a year and a half of discussions, the Association of Art Museum Directors has announced new guidelines for collecting antiquities, reports the New York Times. The new policy uses 1970, the year UNESCO ratified a landmark convention prohibiting trade in illegal antiquities, as its starting point, saying a museum “normally should not” acquire a work unless it has solid proof that the object was outside of its country of probable modern discovery before 1970, or that the object was legally exported from its country of probable modern discovery after 1970.
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June 4, 2008

US Museums bring in stricter antiquity acquisition guidelines

Posted at 12:23 pm in Similar cases

Stricter guidelines have been announced by the Association of Art Museum Directors in the USA. These revised guidelines will not of course apply retrospectively to the huge numbers of acquisitions with which many institutions are filled that took place before these guidelines were implemented.

From:
New Yorks Times

Museums Set Stricter Guidelines for Acquiring Antiquities
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: June 4, 2008

After a year and half of deliberations, the directors of the country’s largest art museums will announce new guidelines on Wednesday for how their institutions should collect antiquities, a volatile issue that has led in recent years to international cultural skirmishes and several highly publicized art restitution cases.

The Association of Art Museum Directors, whose 190 members also include leaders of Canadian and Mexican museums, says the new policy will probably make it even more difficult for museums to build antiquities collections through purchases or, as is more often the case, through gifts and bequests from wealthy private collectors. But they assert that the change will help stanch the flow of objects illegally dug up from archaeological sites or other places.
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November 14, 2003

A funding crisis for museums?

Posted at 8:38 am in British Museum, Similar cases

Museums are facing another funding crisis – but let us not forget that there are many (easily rectified) factors that contribute to their lack of funds.

Firstly, there is the fact that in many cases they have far more artefacts than they can ever display, but are not allowed to dispose of them – so must pay for the storage, maintenance & security for them.

Next though, is the fact that while some of the artefacts in their collections are disputed, other countries have offered loans of new high profile pieces if they are returned. People do not come back to museums to see the same stuff that was there the previous time – they come to see new artefacts such as these. Furthermore, temporary exhibitions are often subject to an admission charge, whilst the rest of the museum is free admission.

Surely re-thinking such factors could help to close the funding gap?

From:
Guardian

Let’s not do the timewarp again
Without money to buy new pieces, our museums will become monuments to the tastes of our predecessors. Where could the funds come from?
Jane Morris
Friday November 14, 2003

Britain’s museum directors warn that we are heading for a crisis. Lack of money to buy new things means that museums and galleries, rather like Miss Haversham, will become frozen in time, monuments to the tastes of 19th- and early 20th-century collectors and curators, but not of those today.

The fact that galleries have been refurbished and extended – from the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing to the creation of Tate Modern – masks a stasis in the collections, they say, which damages our cultural life far more than the leaky roofs or dodgy lavatories lottery money has largely done away with.
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November 12, 2003

Saving antiquities for the Nation

Posted at 8:52 am in Similar cases

Often, when an artwork in the UK comes up for sale, much is made about how it must be saved for the nation – to prevent it falling into the hands of a collector of museum abroad. When countries such as Greece request the return of their artefacts however, their statements are criticised as being purely nationalistic.

From:
Guardian

Tate chief attacks ‘save for the nation’ art policy
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian

Sir Nicholas Serota, the most powerful man in the museum world, dramatically broke ranks with his colleagues yesterday to challenge the idea that vast sums of money should be spent to stop important works of art leaving Britain.

The director of the Tate museums delivered a devastating indictment of the reflex to blindly save treasures “for the nation” when foreign collectors or museums try to buy them, a sacred cow of cultural policy until now.
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July 29, 2003

Differences in attitudes to artefact repatriation

Posted at 9:25 am in British Museum, Similar cases

Museums in the USA were founded on very different principles to many of those in Europe. Nowadays, this difference is starting to manifest itself in their more pragmatic approach to the restitution of disputed artefacts in their collections.

From:
Slate

Trading Places
Cultural property disputes are reshaping the art world—but how?
By Carol Kino
Posted Monday, July 28, 2003, at 12:25 PM PT

It’s a sad truth that the depredations of war and imperialism have sometimes had positive side effects for art history. Take the Metropolitan Museum’s recent “Manet-Velázquez” show, on the influence of 17th-century Spanish painting on 19th-century French art. For most of the 18th century, Spanish artists like Murillo, Zurbaran, and Velázquez were little known outside their homeland. Then in the early 1800s, hundreds of Spanish paintings arrived in Paris as Napoleonic war loot. Some were briefly shown at the Louvre before Napoleon’s defeat, after which they were returned. Later that century, French artists began adopting the Spanish artists’ realist aesthetic and loose, sensuous brushwork—a move that laid the foundations of Impressionism and radically changed the course of modern art.

Unlike many European museums, American museums were built with civic and capitalist muscle, rather than imperial might. Yet well into the 1970s their attitude toward acquisitions—as any expert will admit off the record—was frequently “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But today American courts are dealing with an unprecedented number of Holocaust reparation cases. And last year, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted a well-known New York dealer, Frederick Schultz, for conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. As a result, some foreign collectors and museums have become more cautious about loaning work to museum shows—particularly those in America—and everyone has become vastly more diligent about conducting provenance research before buying.
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January 22, 2003

Problems with the declaration of Universal Museums

Posted at 1:24 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

Many countries (generally most of those whose institutions weren’t involved in signing the declaration) have issues with the “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums”, that was issued a few months ago. The declaration favours only seeing one version of history, while ignoring other verions and the original owners.

From:
People’s Daily

Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Foreign Museums Refuse to Return Cultural relics, Chinese Experts in Action

On 10 December, 2002, eighteen major museums and research institutes of Europe and America, including the British Museum and the Louvre Museum, jointly signed a Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (hereinafter referred to as “Declaration”), which opposes returning art works, especially ancient ones, to their original owners.

On 10 December, 2002, eighteen major museums and research institutes of Europe and America, including the British Museum and the Louvre Museum, jointly signed a Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums (hereinafter referred to as “Declaration”), which opposes returning art works, especially ancient ones, to their original owners.
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January 11, 2003

Do global museums really serve everyone?

Posted at 7:57 am in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

The so called “Universal Museums” claim to represent the whole world, but it must be borne in mind, that this is an entirely self-appointed role, which comes at the expense of many specialist local museums. Proclaiming that they are in a different category of institution, to which the rules don;t apply in the same way as they do to others, raises far more problems than it solves.

From:
The Art Newspaper

We serve all cultures, say the big, global museums
Leading institutions seek to shift focus of debate on restitution
By Martin Bailey

LONDON. The world’s leading museums have for the first time united to issue a declaration. Their statement on “the importance and value of universal museums” follows increasing concern about the politicisation of Greek claims against the British Museum (BM) over the Parthenon Marbles.

Although the declaration released in December does not specifically mention the marbles, it points out that the acquisition of classical antiquities from Greece by European and North American museums “marked the significance of Greek sculpture for mankind as a whole and its enduring value for the contemporary world.”
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December 19, 2002

Museums fear being pressured into returning artefacts

Posted at 8:52 am in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

Many large museums around the world now live in fear of artefacts being removed from their collections, despite the fact, that in many cases the museums themselves are fully aware of the dubious provenance of the works in question.

From:
Chicago Tribune

Posted on Thu, Dec. 19, 2002
Museums balk at returning art objects acquired centuries ago
BY WILLIAM MULLEN
Chicago Tribune

(KRT) – Art museums have been asked to return works stolen by Nazis from wealthy Jews. Native Americans have demanded the return of human remains and sacred objects taken without permission from their ancestors and now in the hands of history museums.

If at first these museums balked at losing some of their most treasured possessions, they soon bowed to both laws and public opinion and repatriated many artifacts.
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December 11, 2002

Declaration on the importance of the Universal Museum

Posted at 12:59 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

More coverage of the declaration on the importance of the Universal Museum – issued without the name of the British Museum included on it, but thought by many to have been masterminded by them. Many have been quick to notice the relevance of this declaration in trying to shore up the British Museums defences for their retention of the Elgin Marbles, against the powerful argument presented by the construction of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.

From:
News Observer

Wednesday, December 11, 2002 3:26PM EST
World galleries back British Museum in dispute with Greece
By ROBERT BARR, ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) – Several of the world’s leading museums defended the British Museum’s right to keep ancient statues taken from the Parthenon 200 years ago, despite Greek demands for their return.

A letter signed by the directors of 18 museums, including the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said works acquired decades ago have become essential to the museums that house them. “Objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era,” the statement said.
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