Category: visual

The UK’s National Trust has a management problem, says a new report. “The report says it is unrealistic to expect a body of 52 council members, meeting only four times a year for three hours at a time, to run an organisation with an annual expenditure of £251m, hundreds of properties, land holdings of 248,000 hectares (612,808 acres), 3 million members and a staff of 6000.”

Two weeks after Iraq’s National Museum was looted, some observers are wondering where all the art ended up. “Despite scattered rumors of artifacts turning up from Tehran to Paris, not a single one of the 90,000 or 120,000 or 170,000 plundered artifacts – no one knows for sure how many – is known to have been offered for sale anywhere in the world. And investigators and legitimate art dealers think they know why.”

Bosnia’s National Museum was at the center of heavy fighting during the civil war. “The National Museum, a quadrangle of four Italian Renaissance buildings surrounding a quiet botanical garden, is wedged between what was the war’s front line and the broad avenue that became a target for snipers. But the staff that stayed on during the war stood guard at night. They hauled exhibitions to the basements and bulwarked bigger pieces with planks and sandbags. Ultimately, the museum was among the few cultural institutions in Bosnia to survive relatively intact. Now, more than seven years after the war’s end, the museum is struggling to reclaim its position as a showcase of Bosnia’s history.”

Who let Iraq’s National Museum get ransacked? What’s missing, and how did it happen?

Two years ago the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas. So what’s become of the site? “Earlier this year, the United Nations’ cultural arm, Unesco, persuaded the Afghan government to reject proposals to install replicas of the ancient Buddhas in the towering cliff niches in which they used to stand.” But repairs to the niches – “which have begun to crumble as rain has seeped into cracks left by the explosions” – have been slow to get underway. “Unesco officials said that that project would get under way when security conditions improve, using $1.8 million given by Japan and special scaffolding from the Messerschmitt Foundation of Germany.”

The Toledo Museum in Ohio, is cutting $1.3 million from its budget, and reducing staff by 14. “Our income from our endowments is down and annual giving, both corporate and individual, is down. Grants are harder to get, and our Ohio Arts Council grant – usually about $200,000 – has been cut twice since it was announced a few months ago.”

While big museums such as the Guggenheim, Whitney and Los Angeles County Museum have cancelled or postponed plans for big expansions, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Institute of Contemporary Art are going ahead with their plans. “The MFA is looking to raise $425 million for the project, the first phase of which is projected to be complete in the spring of 2007. With that phase, the museum will grow from 531,000 to 677,000 square feet, according to the MFA. The ICA’s new building, designed for Fan Pier on the South Boston Waterfront, has been featured in an article in Newsweek and a sketch in The New Yorker. ICA officials say they’ve raised about $17 million of the $60 million they’re looking to bring in for the project; an additional $7.5 million to $8 million should be available when the ICA sells its Boylston Street building.”

The Dia Foundation is opening a new home in the Hudson Valley town of Beacon, about an hour north of New York City. “The Dia:Beacon is on 31 acres along the Hudson and is a five-minute walk from a Metro North train station. Its 240,000 square feet of exhibition space is more than four times the exhibition space of the Whitney Museum of American Art and not quite twice the size of the Tate Modern in London.”

Is Baghdad’s National Museum secured? “Expressing frustration that Iraq’s National Museum, archives and library in Baghdad were not secured against looters and organized art thieves, the director of Berlin’s Near East museum collection, Beata Salje, said Iraqi guards could be hired for as little as $3 a day. ‘Immediate help is necessary,’ Salje said at a news conference with other German experts. ‘It is important that the money is given as quickly as possible to our Iraqi colleagues so they can organize this’.”

Last week, trying to deflect reports of looting of the Iraq National Museum, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared: “The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over. And it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”