That Americans allowed the destruction of Iraqi culture while they stood by and watched has ignited rage among those Iraqis who might have been expected to support the Americans. “Somewhere, in the cacophony of bombs and the orgy of looting that followed, Baghdad’s cultural elite became angry about the war, seeing in its destruction a vulgarity that only pushed the country deeper into degradation. Even today, even in Baghdad, there are people unused to chaos, and chaos now it is.”
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American Cutural Property Commission Official Resigns In Protest
Citing “the wanton and preventable destruction” of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities, the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property has submitted his resignation to President Bush.
Seattle’s ACT Theatre Makes Money Deadline, Survives
Seattle’s ACT Theatre, which said earlier this year that it needed to raise $1.5 million in emergency cash by April 15 or it would close, has found the money. “It was a squeaker, but we did it,” said Susan Trapnell, a former ACT manager who volunteered her time for three months to help raise $1.5 million to keep the wolf from ACT’s door.”
Iraq Art – A Forseeable Tragedy
That Iraq’s museums would be pillaged was a forseeable thing, writes Kenneth Baker. “We have to wonder how the Pentagon and the State Department could fail to see the cultural calamity coming, such a predictable consequence of urban war chaos. Weeks before the invasion, the Archaeological Institute of America published an ‘Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iraq,’ signed by hundreds of scholars from around the world.”
Did Americans Allow Iraq Museum Looting Because Of A Lack Of Appreciation For Art?
Is the fact that American troops protected oil fields but not museums significant? Caroline Abels writes that “we might never know why the looting continued unchecked despite strong early warnings from the world art community that Iraq’s treasures required protection. But the cynic in me wonders whether the American military would have done more to protect the museums had we been a country that better recognized the value of art.”
Reading In Iraq
“In Iraq, and in the Arab world as a whole, public libraries are extremely under-funded and cannot even remotely satisfy the needs of those who want to read. People like me, who had to walk long distances to visit a public library only to be asked to pay huge fees which I could never afford, had no choice but to turn to the libraries of our mosques, which were even poorer than the public ones. The network of bookshops in Iraq is denser than in many other Arab countries. People know about the Iraqis’ eagerness to read. During the 1980s, Iraqi booksellers still ordered several times the volume of what their Egyptian colleagues ordered. And despite the embargo and the weak purchasing power of the past years, every new publication sold like hotcakes.”
Winnipeg To Build Human Rights Museum
Winnipeg Canada is planning to build a $270 million international museum of human rights. About $130 million has been raised so far for the first $200-million phase, to be built on vacant land at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in downtown Winnipeg.
Choosing Destruction For Iraqi Art
Why did the Bush administration choose not to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures? “Only two of the thousands of pieces of art that were stolen after the first Gulf War were recovered. Even if a sculpture of a bronze Akkadian king isn’t important to the Bush administration, you’d think its own self-interest would be: In the eyes of the world, the war’s success will be measured as much by what happens now and over the coming months as by the shock and awe campaign.”
Is Canada Getting Out Of The Canadian Culture Business?
Did the Canadian government realize it was slicing up some of Canada’s most successful TV shows and bumping them off the air when it cut $25 million from a fund to help produce them? Or has the government just decided that spending money subsidizing Canadian culture is no longer a good idea? Whatever – the impact of this decision will be huge.
Getting Down To Downloading
How are the new music industry downloading services doing? “Various analyses of the half-dozen or so services put the total of their combined subscribers at between 300,000 and 500,000. Emusic, the one legitimate music service that discloses its subscriber numbers, claimed 70,000 subscribers as of year-end 2002. Meanwhile, Kazaa, the leader of the file-trading services not sanctioned by the music industry, has been downloaded more than 200 million times.”