“Our intention is not just to get them back but to put a stop to trafficking, and I think we are having a degree of success: many museums and countries have changed their rules and regulations. It is not a question of property, but of morality. If the role of museums is to educate, they cannot possibly hang on to illegal artefacts.”
Tag: 11.17.11
The Problem With Newspaper Book Reviews: They’re Just Not Good Enough
Bland general reviews really serve little purpose…
The Future Of Books? Many Futures
“My prediction about books in the early years of the 21st century: readers, writers, and bibliophiles in general will look back on the cross-fertilisation of the digital world with the global recession, and marvel at the strange fruit that flourished in the paradise of texts.”
15 Leading UK Theatres Set Up New Musical Theatre Circuit
“A number of us have been saying that there has been a growing sense of a lack of musical work on the number one circuit and we have been talking about addressing that in a collective way.”
Bacteria Trained To Clean Paintings
“We grow the bacteria in a culture that has the substrate we want to eliminate. Effectively trained to eat salt and glue, the bacteria are brushed onto the frescoes and covered with a gel that, when heated with lights, creates humid conditions (perfect for nibbling) and aids cleanup.”
Museums Devoted To A Single Artist – How Do You Get Visitors To Return?
“The idea (hope?) of keeping an artist’s entire body of work under one roof makes sense only if there is sufficient interest in that artist and the estate can provide an endowment that covers most or all operating costs.”
National Book Awards Winners Announced
“Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Salvage the Bones,” a haunting tale of the struggles of a 15-year-old pregnant girl as a hurricane bears down on her fictional Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Miss.”
Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Expands Beyond WWII Holocaust
“Since Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994, the organization has devoted itself exclusively to the memory of Holocaust survivors. … [But] the foundation is now incorporating testimonies from [other] mass atrocities” – to start, those of the Rwandans, Cambodians and Armenians – “into its archives.”
Turkish Television Takes On Topic Of Child Brides
Roughly one-quarter of Turkish women are married before age 18, with the number nearing one-half in parts of Anatolia. A new prime-time serial, whose two-minute trailer has become an online hit in Turkey, is addressing the issue openly.
Piet Mondrian Had A London Period (Who Knew?)
An exhibition in London “examines a little-known period of Mondrian’s life in the late 1930s when he lived for two years in a bedsit in Hampstead, north London, and socialised with … avant-garde British artists.”