Category: visual

“On October 28 the Reiss Engelhorn Museum (REM) in Mannheim, Germany, filed a lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation for making high-resolution images of public domain artworks from its collection available for download. … The institution is seeking the removal of 17 specific images of artworks that it commissioned from its in-house photographer, Jean Christen.”

“Words that Europeans once routinely used to describe other cultures or peoples, like ‘negro,’ ‘Indian’ or ‘dwarf’ will be replaced with less racially charged terminology.” Says the Amsterdam museum’s director of history, “We Dutch are called kaas kops, or cheeseheads, sometimes, and we wouldn’t like it if we went to a museum in another country and saw descriptions of images of us as kaas kop woman with kaas kop child’.”

“The collection was begun by Mr. Forbes’s father, Malcolm Forbes, and put together over 40 years. ‘This is the biggest and most important Second Empire collection in the world,’ [the auctioneer] said. Major works from the collection have circulated in the United States as an itinerant exhibition over the past dozen years.”

“[Brian McCarty] was shocked to find an altered version of his photograph Cinderella photoshopped with the terrorist group’s flag. … The [altered] text reads, ‘Even if war destroys everything, the Islamic sign and state is protected and will never fall down.'”

“On Dec. 4, North Korea’s government officially debuted its Angkor Panorama Museum in Cambodia, one of Kim Jong Un’s few foreign allies. The display was created by members of a 4,000-person ‘work unit’ devoted to deifying the Kim dynasty through statues, panoramas and other propaganda pieces. … But this exhibit instead glorifies Cambodia’s ancient Khmer kingdom.”

“‘Mi vestido soy yo,’ Frida Kahlo used to say – my clothing is me. … Kahlo’s look was inspired by the traditional clothes of the Tehuantepec region of southeast Mexico, where women often earn more money than their husbands and administer the family assets.” (photo journal)

“The Petersen looks less like mobility-in-motion and more like an ambiguously unspooled Diet Coke can. What is obvious is that the Petersen wanted to make a splash.”

The plaintiff described such paintings as The Resurrection by Perugino and The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes by Tintoretto as “offensive aesthetic whitewashing” because the real Jesus of Nazareth had “black hair like wool and skin of bronze color” like he does. The suit claims the museum and the city of New York are violating his rights under the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

What did the guy expect if he didn’t venture beyond the European galleries? He ought to have visited the Byzantine, Ethiopian, and Armenian collections. (He even missed Gauguin’s Ia Orana Maria [Hail Mary].)

“It has long been known that the bluestones that form Stonehenge’s inner horseshoe came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, around 140 miles from Salisbury Plain. Now archaeologists have discovered a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, to the north of those hills, that match Stonehenge’s bluestones in size and shape.”