Category: visual

“Concerned archaeologists urged United States military leaders to take more forceful steps to protect Iraqi’s cultural treasures and to restore control of them to the local Department of Antiquities. For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country’s antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.”

Trickle-down festivalism, which is largely supported by institutions and foundations, is influencing artists and curators alike. It has generated a parallel art world inhabited foremost by curators who talk mostly to one another and look mostly at one another’s shows, always focusing on the same coterie of artists. The prevailing artistic strategy is to emphasize topical subject matter — the urban infrastructure, globalization, cultural identity — while relying on all-but-exhausted international styles, like Post-Minimal installation or Conceptual Art. The prevailing curatorial strategy is a big, catch-all idea about the present condition of life on earth approached with multidisciplinary intent. A result is the repeated substitution of good intentions for good art, unmanageable agendas for focus and shows that, between the art, the labels and the catalogs, are largely talk. For the most part, the viewer is left with next to nothing, other than a depressing hollowness.”

This week there will be a vote on allowing the building of Europe’s tallest skyscraper in London. “Nothing can avoid the fact that this massive building will transform the scale of London. St Paul’s Cathedral still holds its own against tall buildings in the City, but London Bridge Tower is three times its height. At the moment, Tower 42, the former NatWest Tower, sets an unofficial 600ft height limit in central London. If London Bridge Tower gets the go-ahead, all developers will be aiming at 1,000ft, the limit imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority. London will become a high-rise city, with the dome of St Paul’s slowly reduced to a pimple. Organised opposition to such a transformation has largely evaporated.”

The looting of the Iraq Museum is a loss for the world. “The losses will be felt worldwide, but its greatest impact will be on the Iraqi people themselves when it comes to rebuilding their sense of national identity. International cultural organisations had urged before the war that the cultural heritage of Iraq, which has more than 10,000 archaeological sites, be spared. US forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have given their services. ‘The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible. They know that this is a museum. They protect oil ministries but not the cultural heritage’.”

The looting of Iraq’s museums is “a cultural catastrophe. Yesterday the museum’s exhibition halls and security vaults were a barren mess – display cases smashed, offices ransacked and floors littered with hand-written index cards recording the timeless detail of more than 170,000 rare items that were pilfered. Worse, in their search for gold and gems, the looters got into the museum’s underground vaults, where they smashed the contents of the thousands of tin trunks. It was here that staff had painstakingly packed priceless ceramics that tell the story of life from one civilisation to the next through 9000 fabled years in Mesopotamia.”

The Mosul Museum in Iraq has been looted. “The looters knew what they were looking for, and in less than 10 minutes had walked off with several million dollars worth of Parthian sculpture. “Iraq has a great history,” said the museum’s curator. “It’s just been wrecked. I’m extremely angry. We used to have American and British tourists who visited this museum. I want to know whether the Americans accept this.”

The Mona Lisa turns 500 this year. “Over the centuries, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been denounced as a femme fatale, celebrated as the paragon of womanhood, inspired three suicides, and survived a theft. Yet that serene smile staring at us behind bulletproof glass in Paris’s Louvre museum remains mysterious.” And yet, some of her mysteries have been solved…

Many in the art world are concerned that Iraq’s cultural treasures will be looted after the war ends. “After the last gulf war a lot of treasures disappeared onto the black market and archaeologists in Britain and the US are concerned this will be repeated on a much larger scale in the power vacuum after the fall of Saddam Hussein, as happened in Afghanistan. For poor Iraqis the temptation to sell stolen antiquities will be greatly increased if it is known there is a ready market in the west. Alarm bells had been set ringing by reports of a meeting between a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), with US defence and state department officials before the start of the war. The group offered help in preserving Iraq’s invaluable archaeological collections, but archaeologists fear there is a hidden agenda to ease the way for exports post-Saddam.”

The American artists who came of age in the 60s and 70s are the country’s greatest generation of artists. “They are men mostly, with big egos and big ideas. They were the first Americans to influence Europeans. The work these artists made changed, or at least questioned, the nature of art: what it looked like, its size, its materials, its attitude toward the places where it was shown, its relation to architecture, light and space and to the land. The artists even questioned whether art needed to be a tangible object. Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Earth art, video art, Conceptualism – suddenly art could be nothing more than an idea, a thought on a piece of paper that played in your head. It could be ephemeral or atmospheric, like the experience of a room illuminated by colored fluorescent tubes.”