Tag: 04.17.03

That Americans allowed the destruction of Iraqi culture while they stood by and watched has ignited rage among those Iraqis who might have been expected to support the Americans. “Somewhere, in the cacophony of bombs and the orgy of looting that followed, Baghdad’s cultural elite became angry about the war, seeing in its destruction a vulgarity that only pushed the country deeper into degradation. Even today, even in Baghdad, there are people unused to chaos, and chaos now it is.”

Citing “the wanton and preventable destruction” of Iraq’s National Museum of Antiquities, the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property has submitted his resignation to President Bush.

That Iraq’s museums would be pillaged was a forseeable thing, writes Kenneth Baker. “We have to wonder how the Pentagon and the State Department could fail to see the cultural calamity coming, such a predictable consequence of urban war chaos. Weeks before the invasion, the Archaeological Institute of America published an ‘Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iraq,’ signed by hundreds of scholars from around the world.”

Is the fact that American troops protected oil fields but not museums significant? Caroline Abels writes that “we might never know why the looting continued unchecked despite strong early warnings from the world art community that Iraq’s treasures required protection. But the cynic in me wonders whether the American military would have done more to protect the museums had we been a country that better recognized the value of art.”

Winnipeg Canada is planning to build a $270 million international museum of human rights. About $130 million has been raised so far for the first $200-million phase, to be built on vacant land at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in downtown Winnipeg.

Why did the Bush administration choose not to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures? “Only two of the thousands of pieces of art that were stolen after the first Gulf War were recovered. Even if a sculpture of a bronze Akkadian king isn’t important to the Bush administration, you’d think its own self-interest would be: In the eyes of the world, the war’s success will be measured as much by what happens now and over the coming months as by the shock and awe campaign.”

Rio de Janeiro officials are hoping that a splashy new Guggenheim museum there will help the city. “Local officials are hailing the proposed museum project as part of a grand new vision of Rio, the South American capital of sun and samba that in the future also could be considered an art lover’s tourist destination. But even as the project inches closer to final approval, the new Guggenheim branch’s critics are growing in numbers, threatening to derail the city’s plans. They say the museum should be subordinated to more pressing social needs such as roads, schools and health care…”