Tag: 05.15.03

After Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art got a grant in 2000 to drop its admission charges, the museum saw a dramatic increase in visitors. Now Telstra – the free-admission underwriter – has agreed to continue the sponsorship for three more years. “Telstra will inject more than $500,000 annually into the MCA in a three-year arrangement to underwrite the free-entry policy. The deal continues an original sponsorship arrangement that allowed the gallery to scrap its $12 admission fee in mid-2000.”

“Dozens of Jewish sites, artifacts, documents, rare books and manuscripts are being discovered, analyzed and restored in southern Italy and Sicily. This work by scholars and government authorities is beginning to flesh out the largely unknown story of vibrant yet long-lost communities of Jews that inhabited the region from Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from southern Italy, known then as the Kingdom of Naples, in the 16th century. Few returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century.”

“Contemporary architecture has erected innumerable barriers between inside and outside, building and nature. It’s there and we’re here, and that’s that. It wasn’t always so. Access to light and air were starting points and first principles of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, rights instead of accidents. Until air conditioning and tinted glass made them seem passe, sunscreens, deep windows and natural ventilation were standard features, as though architecture itself were a living, breathing thing.”

“Over the past decades, museums have come to play multiple roles in our lives, but surely none is more important than their ability – in the current period of international turmoil and political realignments – to connect each of us with what other people value culturally and artistically.”