Category: visual

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.”

The United States says it will help restore the Iraq National Museum. “Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Baghdad museum was ‘one of the great museums in the world’ and that the US would take a leading role in restoring it. Coalition forces were criticised for not protecting the institution, which housed many treasures from ‘the cradle of civilisation’, when it was ransacked on Friday. But critics say it’s too late. ‘And it’s gone, and it’s lost. If Marines had started before, none of this would have happened. It’s too late. It’s no use. It’s no use’.”

See pictures of damage to the museum here

New York’s Whitney Museum has decided to cancel plans for a $200 million expansion designed by Rem Koolhaas, a signal that there may be further belt-tightening for the institution. “We’re feeling the pinch. A project like this would be a big challenge, and we’re not in a position to proceed with it.”

“For decades, American Expressionism has been denigrated, if not ignored. Postwar conservative art critics and politicians derided the work as art by ‘Reds and fellow travelers.’ Contemporary critics are no kinder.” But Bram Dijkstra says this is grossly unfair, and he’s making a case for it in a new book on the subject. “This is not just art with a social content, it is great art with a social content.”

Southern California museums are facing money problems just like anywhere else. But though some high-profile building projects have been postponed or canceled, others continue. “For every local building plan that has gone awry, several others are shaping up. If all the major projects that are in the works materialize, by 2005 the museum landscape here will look dramatically different.”

Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad has been destroyed. “Once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters. The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum came to light only today, as the frenzied looting that swept much of the capital over the previous three days began to ebb.”