The US Customs unit set up in 2000 to investigate stolen art has been subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security. “The agents who had concentrated exclusively on tracking and seizing smuggled art have now been redeployed to investigate cases related to the war on terrorism and financial fraud. Although cases of stolen art will still be investigated by Customs agents, no employees will work exclusively on art investigations.”
Tag: 01.19.04
In Praise Of Book TV
“I’m a little agog at the number of friends and acquaintances who still respond with blank looks when I start babbling about the bounty that is Book TV, even though it celebrated its fifth anniversary last fall. There is intelligent life on television, I assure them, and its name is Book TV.”
GroupThink – Choosing The WTC Memorial Plan
Choosing a plan for the WTC memorial was an arduous task for the project’s jury. “With 5,201 entries to consider, the original strategy was for the submissions to be divided among three groups of jurors. The jury decided, though, that every juror would look at every board, including some 400 that had been disqualified on technicalities.”
Returning Marbles To Greece Would “Distort” History
Salvatore Settis argues that returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece would distort history and shouldn’t be considered. “The Acropolis is the result of an operation that eliminated its Christian and Ottoman past. In order to reconstruct what is only one of the various possible forms of the Acropolis, all other forms are negated; this process would be crowned and legitimised by the return of the marbles. It would sanction the idea that of all the history that has flowed through the Acropolis (in fact, the history of Europe), only one moment matters and all others must be suppressed.”