The New Acropolis Museum, as one of the most recently opened tourist sites in Greece is lucky enough to have high quality facilities for visitors, such as disabled access provisions. Many other sites in Greece are less fortunate however. A new initiative aims to try and solve this problem by upgrading many of the other sites to make them more easily accessible to all visitors.

From:
Athens News Agency

11/26/2010
Plan on sites services

ANa-Mpa/The culture and tourism ministry on Wednesday outlined a plan to improve services at Greek museums and archaeological sites, especially in terms of disabled access and availability of water.

The new programme follows a study that revealing a lack of vital services in some 150 museums around the country, including some of the most important and most popular sites.
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The BBC’s series – A history of the world in 100 objects covered various artefacts whose ownership was disputed, many people aren’t happy with the way that this fact was only given cursory coverage, focussing on the artefact rather than its history.

From:
Modern Ghana

An Akan drum and the British Museum’s history of the world
Columnist: Kofi Amenyo

So it is true that human beings and human culture began in Africa, eh? Homo sapiens evolved in Africa at least 150,000 years ago. The fact was brought home to us again when the director of the British Museum (BM), Neil MacGregor, in collaboration with BBC, selected 100 items from the museum’s vast collection to tell the history of the world in a hundred 15-minute programmes on Radio 4.

Human life started in Black Africa – specifically in present day Tanzania. When the narrator tells us that “we all have Africa in our DNA” one feels proud to be African. Two items at the beginning of the series (2 and 3) were from the East African Rift Valley: the Olduvai Stone Chopper and the Olduvai Handaxe. Both have the distinction of being the oldest objects in the BM. They are 1.8 million years old!
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Jim O’Donnell has written an interesting review of James Cuno’s book on the so-called Encyclopaedic Museum.

As with many other readers of this book, he has come across gaping flaws in some of the arguments presented by Cuno.

From:
Around The World in Eighty Years

Book Review: “Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage”
Posted on November 15, 2010

Last week, New York’s Metropolitan Museum announced that it will return 19 objects from King Tut’s tomb to Egypt – 19 small bits and fragments. The Met has been quick to toot its own horn, saying the return of these objects was voluntary and that they were under no legal obligation to do anything. But we’re not talking the Rosetta Stone here. Nor the famous Nefertiti bust held in Berlin. Nor the incredible Haremhad statue detained at the Met. Nineteen trinkets is nothing to crow about. Ahhh but the magnanimous purveyos of culture will crow.

Stolen objects that reside in the great museums of the world are nothing more than a monument to imperialism and the days of overt exploitation.
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Kwame Opoku responds to the article by Tom L Freudenheim that I posted a few weeks ago.

From:
Modern Ghana

SHOULD AESTHETIC CONSIDERATIONS TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS WITH REGARD TO LOOTED ARTEFACTS?
Columnist: Kwame Opoku, Dr.

We read with great interest an article by Tom L. Freudenheim, a former art museum director and former assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution entitled “What Is Lost When Works are Trophies” that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2010 (1) and was reproduced in Elginism (2) on September 28, 2010 under the heading “Disputed artefacts – famous for being famous…”

The article contains statements which deserve close examination. The first sentence surprised me:

“It’s interesting to contemplate how works of art, which museums generally want us to appreciate for their aesthetic values, can turn into trophies: emblems of issues or events that have nothing to do with their status as art.”
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Many experts feel that China’s attempts to catalogue (with the aim of eventually recovering) the artefacts looted from the Summer Palace in Beijing is unlikely to be successful.

From:
France 24

01 November 2010 – 17H15
China bid to regain looted relics a tough task: experts

AFP – China’s call on museums and antique collectors around the world to return relics looted from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing 150 years ago is unlikely to yield any significant results, experts say.

The Army Museum in Paris and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum are just two of the institutions that possess items taken from the former resort for Qing dynasty emperors — and are not about to give them up easily, they say.
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Following the End of Marion True’s trial in Italy, she is now able to speak freely about the case. What is revealed in this interview suggests that the trial was far more of a political exercise than it was one specifically aimed at her. It also suggests that the Getty was quick to distance itself from the whole thing & jumped at the opportunity to write things off as the actions of a single person – an approach that suggests a complete lack of accountability within the Museum in terms of due diligence when acquiring artefacts.

From:
The New Yorker

October 14, 2010
Marion True on her Trial and Ordeal
Posted by Hugh Eakin

On Wednesday morning, in a Roman courtroom, the long-running criminal case against the former Getty Museum curator Marion True was dismissed. In less than ten minutes of deliberation, judges approved a motion by True’s lawyers to stop the proceedings—which, as I described in The New Yorker back in 2007, concerned classical art of allegedly illicit Italian provenance acquired by the Getty Museum in the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties—because the statute of limitations on all charges had expired.

It was a paradoxical end to a trial that has run for more than five years and has been a fulcrum of Italy’s efforts to reclaim major works from leading American collections. Since the trial began, no fewer than five museums—as well as several prominent collectors and dealers—have entered agreements to relinquish prize examples of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art to Italy. The American Association of Art Museum Directors has adopted strict new guidelines for acquiring antiquities (pdf), and many museums have all but given up on buying classical art.
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Tiffany Jenkins (who was also one of the organisers of this event) is giving a talk this evening at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery about the ethical issues surrounding human remains in museums.

From:
Bristol City Council

Human Remains: objects to study or ancestors to bury?
Thursday 11November 2010 7.30 –9pm
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
Speaker: Dr Tiffany Jenkins

FULLY BOOKED

Cultural sociologist Dr Tiffany Jenkins explores the ethical questions surrounding museums and the holding and display of human remains. What is respectful treatment? How should they be displayed? Should human remains be repatriated?

Dr Tiffany Jenkins is arts and society director of the Institute of Ideas. Her book ‘Contesting Human Remains: Museums and the Crisis of Cultural Authority’ is out Autumn 2010.

The British Museum regularly props up its defence for the retention of the Elgin Marbles with the fact that the sculptures can be seen in their museum free of charge, without any real debate a to whether this is necessarily a universally good thing. As budgets for government spending are cut in the UK, more & more questions must be asked about whether these institutions should keep their free admission, or charge visitors (which doesn’t necessarily need to be a large amount).

From:
Evening Standard

British Museum reduces opening hours as budget cuts begin to bite
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent
30.09.10

The British Museum is to reduce its opening hours from January to cope with government budget cuts.

Late-night opening to the permanent collections will be axed on Thursdays and restricted to one evening a week — Fridays. Staff recruitment will be “significantly reduced”.
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Two different people both seem to be advocating that loans of artefacts between museum are the way of the future. in the case of the British Museum however, this is always something that is done very much on their terms – they won’t countenance any sort of longer term loaning. It buys them some sympathy, when they can tell people how much of their collection has been lent out – but in most cases these loans are made for less than a year. MacGregor seems to like the idea of sharing to nearby museums – actually allowing the original owners of the artefacts to see them again in their own country is clearly a more contentious issue however.

The second article sees lending in far more equitable terms – partly as a way of helping museums to deal with an art market inflated by wealthy private collectors.

From:
Museums Association

MacGregor – Museums can be Lending Libraries
Rebecca Atkinson
05/10/2010 international level

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum (BM), has called for national museums to be seen as “lending libraries” from which partner museums can borrow objects to use as they wish.

Speaking at the Museums Association conference, MacGregor discussed the History of the World in 100 Objects collaboration between the BM, the BBC and regional museums.
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After more than twenty years of campaigning, a belt has been returned from a museum in Albany to the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation.

From:
Watertown Daily Times

Wampum belt returned to reservation museum
CEREMONY HELD: Mohawks say 300-year-old ‘wolf belt’ symbolizes tribe’s history
By LORI SHULL
TIMES STAFF WRITER
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2010

HOGANSBURG — A 300-year-old piece of history returned to the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation on Friday, after more than a century in a museum in Albany.

In a ceremony steeped in Mohawk traditions, about 100 people came out to install the belt made of purple and white wampum beads in the tribe’s museum. Speeches in Mohawk, native singers and a traditional lunch of corn soup and fry bread ushered the 2-foot-long belt into a long glass case in a specially designed room in the small museum.
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As part of the annual Battle of Ideas, a two day event organised by the Institute of Ideas, there is a debate about who owns culture, where the Elgin Marbles no doubt feature in the discussion. Geoff White from the Marbles Reunited campaign will be one of the speakers there.

From:
Battle of Ideas

Losing our marbles? Who owns culture?
Sunday 31 October, 12.30pm until 1.30pm, Courtyard Gallery Battle for the Past

The ownership of the Parthenon Marbles has been disputed since their removal from Athens in the early 19th century, by Lord Elgin. Some argue the sculptures belong in Greece, where they were carved almost two and a half thousand years go. Advocates of repatriation insist that the marbles are part of the heritage of Greece, and should never have been taken in the first place. Others feel that the marbles are now part of the history of the British Museum, and point out that in their current Bloomsbury home they can be seen in relation to other cultures, as part of world history. But with the opening of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, a state-of-the-art centre, claims for their return are growing stronger.
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One of the key differences between museums in the UK & those in the US, is that while the ones in Britain tend to often be run almost as though they are a distant offshoot of the government, those in the USA tend to be run far more like a normal business.

In the UK, deaccessioning of any form is generally seen as something to be avoided – the charters that govern many of the countries major institutions explicitly prohibit it except in a very narrow range of special cases. This tends to lead (whatever the intention of the institution) to the dominance of quantity over quality, meaning that maintaining the overall quality of the collection is only possible by keeping vast amounts of it permanently in storage. In the USA on the other hand, the opposite approach is often taken. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas is an excellent example of this approach, whereby acquisitions are only ever made with the aim of enhancing the quality of the collection & as a result are generally countered with a consequent deaccessioning to remove one of the less significant pieces from the museum. As a result, the museum’s collection is generally percieved as gaining in quality over time, rather than merely increasing in size or scope. The running costs of the museum are also significantly reduced by the fact that it does not need to create vast stores of artefacts that are never seen by the public except at special request.

More contentious though in the US (& even more so in the UK, particularly in the case of the Watts Gallery), is the idea that museums could sell off parts of their collection to cover their own operating costs.

The problem is that whilst there are benefits to both arguments, many institutions in the UK use anti-deaccessioning clauses in their governing charters as something to shelter behind when restitution requests are made, rather than actually dealing with the issue itself.

From:
New York Times blogs

September 14, 2010, 4:38 pm
Board of Regents Ending Injunction Against Museums’ Art Sales
By ROBIN POGREBIN

In a surprise development in the battle over whether museums should be allowed to sell art to cover operating costs, the New York State Board of Regents on Tuesday approved the expiration of emergency regulations regarding such “deaccessioning” on Oct. 8.

Those rules, which enjoined such sales, have been in effect since 2008. After hearing views from museums statewide, “there was no consensus on the efficacy of those emergency regulations,” David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner, said in a statement. Thus, “those regulations will be allowed to expire, allowing the prior regulations regarding museum collections to once again take effect.”
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