Blog

The destruction of the Iraq Museum is a disaster. “Some objects will doubtless be recovered, and a few of the most remarkable may turn out to have been hidden away. Even so, when the news about the museum emerged some people over here began talking about how the Iraqi people had ‘lost their past’. A museum like the one in Baghdad, they argued, gives a people a sense of who they are, and where they come from. Is this true? There is a lot of sentimentality attached to archaeology by outsiders.”

An American artist named Rowena was surprised to discover that two of her oil paintings hung in Saddam Husein’s personal quarters. The paintings are fantasy raunch, and “Rowena, 58, said she did the oil paintings that hung in the dictator’s den about 15 years ago as covers for bodice-ripper paperbacks with titles such as ‘King Dragon’ and ‘Shadows Out of Hell’.” Oh, and she’d like them back…

Britain is sending a team of art experts to Iraq to try to help pick up the pieces after the smashing and looting of the National Museum of Antiquities. “Officials from Unesco, the UN cultural agency, will meet staff from the British Museum on Thursday to discuss tactics for Iraq. ‘There will be a large conservation task to be done, extending over many years and requiring the widest possible international co-operation’.”

The British Museum is offering to help the Iraq Museum. “The museum is considering the unprecedented move of arranging extended loans or gifts from its vast stores to help recreate the shattered displays when Iraqi museums reopen. It has the world’s greatest Mesopotamian collection outside Iraq.”

More than 1000 guests turned up for the opening of Charles Saatchi’s new gallery in London. The crowd was full of artists and celebrities and “they were treated to a nude happening by Spencer Tunick. Following the 35-year-old artist’s directions, 160 naked volunteers, some giggling with embarrassment, posed in several positions – to the delight of tourists on the adjacent London Eye.”

The images of Saddam’s statues being pulled down in Iraq were compelling. “What is it about a dead and really poor statue – a boring one indeed – that rouses such personal antipathy? And why did we who were not there stay so gripped throughout the whole business? All of us are aware of the symbolic freight of statues like this one. Their toppling clearly symbolizes the end of the overthrown regime. Often the pent-up resentments against a now-absent leader are taken out on his images. The history of art and the history of all images is punctuated by events of this kind…”

Archaeologists are trying to track down items plundered from Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities. “They can’t put the sculptures, statues, and coins back on the shelves from which they were wrested. But they can put together a database of what was lost in the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. By gathering as much detailed information as possible, they hope to render unsellable the thousands of artifacts stolen from Iraq’s largest museum, one of the region’s most important. The more that is known about the lost pieces, the less likely they will be able to pass into private hands on the black market, scholars and curators say.”