After years of fierce debate Berlin’s mayor announced plans to rebuilt an 18th century royal palace. The building will replace the nearly demolished Palace of the Republic, the East German equivalent of a parliament building, which had been built on the Schlossplatz in the 50’s. This is also the site of the former palace and is located next to the central Berlin boulevard Unter den Linden and near Museums Island, where most of Berlin’s main public museums are located. The new palace building will primarily be used to showcase the city museums’ collection of non-European art, currently housed in a suburb of Berlin. Many German commentators Tuesday criticized the plans for the new Stadtschloss and called it a lost opportunity for the city. One commentator (from Die Tageszeitung) said that “the area from the Museum Island to the Schlossplatz will be turned into a museum space, in which at best, the tourist masses will play the extras in a scene of urban life.”So are the construction plans merely kitsch or will they enable the city to heal a painful urban wound in its historic center? Rem Koolhaas once defended the Stadtschloss by saying that modernist architects have failed to deal with history. There were people in Poland and elsewhere who recreated entire historical cities, and although western architects despised them they had no real alternative to offer. So instead of defending the preservation of the Palast der Republik, as the prime symbol of the former totalitarian regime, he supported the idea of (re)creating a sacred space in the heart of Berlin. But is it possible to make people forget their recent past and let them believe in eternal values by building a new museum? Perhaps they should call it Palast der Utopien..

Read related article (Der Spiegel, April 24, 2007)

According to Alexa.com, an Amazon.com search engine that was originally developed by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, the top 10 of popular - most visited and most linked - art museums on the Web are:

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art
2. MoMA
3. Tate Online
4. Musée du Louvre
5. National Gallery of Art
6. The British Museum
7. The State Hermitage Museum
8. The National Gallery
9. National Portrait Gallery
10. Design Museum

Other famous museums:

Centre Pompidou (11), Guggenheim Museum (13), Museum del Prado (14), Walker Art Center (18), Rijksmuseum (26), Van Gogh Museum (27), Finnish National Gallery (75) en het Stedelijk Museum (103).

Source: Alexa.com

(Note: I omitted the first two in the list, Yale Center for British Art and the Smithsonian Institution, since they skew the list)

Quite a witty and sophisticated way of promoting a new programme: on your blog with flash-powered YouTube videos of one of the most idiosyncratic film directors of our time. It made my day.

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Browsing the web trying to find out how 2.0 developments are touching down in various areas, I stumbled upon the lovely lucid website of Whitechapel Gallery. What I like about this site, apart from its modest and minimal design, is that it shows the visitor right away what happens here, and what you can find on the site and in the gallery.

But, after closer examination, I have yet to discover what Whitechapel exactly is (I have been there, so I know what it is; just for sake of the argument, bear with me). I mean, I see that next to exhibitions - which you would expect in a gallery - there are talks & events, films, poetry, music, special events (not just normal events, but special events), a bar, a shop and so much more. Nowhere one simple line that states the identity of this gallery. Why do I want that? Take Palais de Tokyo for instance; I like their tagline: site de création contemporaine. To me that makes (some) sense. Or Tate Modern; if you go to Tate Online you learn immediately what goes on there: British and International Modern and Contemporary Art.

Let’s check a different website: Amazon.com. Aha! Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & More. CNET? Technology Product Reviews, Price Comparisons, Tech Video, and More. The New York Times? Breaking News, World News & Multimedia (Multimedia? Interesting line up). Google? … ehm, search? For what? Information? I get it. (Could it be so that someone who is not familiar with the Internet, would not understand Google at first sight? Same goes for Yahoo, although the portal function is much more clear than the stand-alone search function. I don’t think so; humans have evolved to become googlers, craving for information. It’s sheer logic that explains the simplicity of the search engine interface.)

And what was I getting at? Probably identity, communication and navigation. If someone lands on your site, that person should be able to recognize what it is he is looking at, and where to go from there, without too much hassle. With the Long Tail in mind, more and more people will accidentally come across museum sites through search. If museums do get such interested visitors (take an obscure music aficionado, looking for sound artist Ryoji Ikeda and finding his 2006 performance on Tate Online), they’d better accommodate them and show them around, handing them options to elaborate on their query. Until then, they don’t care they are in that specific museum, all they want is answers to their queries. But they might start caring if the museum site provides the answers, and thus a relationship can be built.

And that is something the Whitechapel Gallery has done well, to have a good overview of what’s there. That obscure music aficionado could visit this site through googling music magazine The Wire, which happens to be Whitechapel’s media partner in its music series. If he gets to that page, he immediately sees in the top more (related) categories.

Luckily most museums do seem to unveil their identity at the index page. But after that the masquerade begins.

(One more thing: I think it also makes you more visible in search engines, which improves your ranking.)

Visitor numbers to Swedish museums have declined dramatically since the re-introduction of entrance fees in January this year. A survey by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter compared visitor figures for 15 museums in January 2007 with the same month in 2006. This revealed a decrease of nearly 90,000 visitors to 183,000, from 272,300 the previous year—a substantial drop of 33%.

Read full article (The Art Newspaper, April 25, 2007)

On May 23 The Vermeer Centre will open its doors in the Dutch city of Delft. Johannes Vermeer is one of the best known artists from the Dutch Golden Age. His name is inextricably linked with Delft, the city in which he was born in 1632 and where he lived and worked all his life. The Vermeer Centre is housed on the historic site of the former St. Lucas Guild, where Vermeer was Dean of the painters for many years, and offers a visual voyage of discovery through the life, work and city of Johannes Vermeer. The visitor steps into 17th century Delft, sees samples from Vermeer’s oeuvre, goes in search of his mentor and the stories behind the paintings. In the studio, the visitor learns how Vermeer approached his work and about his mastery of light, composition and colour.

Although this is probably as close as you can get to the man who painted the Girl with the Pearl Earring, don’t expect to see any of his original works since all them reside in museum collections outside of Delft. In the Netherlands both the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis own a painting that is permanently on display, so whenever you visit Delft the real Vermeer is only half an hour away.

Go to website Vermeer Centre Delft
Go to website Rijksmuseum
Go to website Mauritshuis

After recent developments for a Louvre branch in the United Arab Emirates, it seems that Egyptians may get a chance to view European collections on their own land. Referring to an article in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung the online edition of Artforum reports, Germany intends to open a Museum of European Art in Alexandria.

The director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum, Dietrich Wildung, made the announcement during a radio interview. The planned museum should function as a symbol of gratitude to Egypt from European countries in recognition of the many works of art that have come from the country to European museums over the last two hundred years. No word, of course, on the conditions under which these works made the trip. According to Wildung, the project is a European one; talks have already been held with the Italian government.

This ‘expression of gratitude’ for a century of generous “loans” couldn’t come at a better moment. For a long time Egypt has been seeking to obtain the Nefertiti bust, a three-thousand-year-old portrait of the ancient Egyptian queen, from Berlin. Zahi Hawwas, head of the Egyptian antiquities administration, is spearheading the move to bring the world-famous face home. But in the same radio interview in which he announced the planned opening of the museum in Alexandria, the director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin rejected this request for safety reasons.

Apparently it is safe enough for for western art to travel to Egypt, but for Egyptian cultural heritage to come home different rules are still applied.

Go to website Egyptian Museum Berlin
Go to website Egyptian Museum Cairo
Go to podcast (in German)

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At the invitation of the Museum With No Frontiers, 14 countries from around the Mediterranean and the European Union have agreed to collaborate on producing a virtual museum on the Internet that explores Islamic art and material culture in the Mediterranean region. Although the Islamic world and its artistic traditions stretch from Kashghar in China to Dakar in Senegal, this project is focusing on the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin to tell the story of Islamic art.

Read article (Alarab, April 21, 2007)
Go to website Discover Islamic Art

An English video game company is getting ready to recreate some of the world’s most famous cultural hot spots. Two software companies have joined forces in the hope of bringing new technology to museums, castles and famous homes throughout the world. It was the first in the world to develop a real-time virtual experience for inaccessible buildings such as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage and Shakespeare’s birthplace, allowing disabled visitors to explore areas they would be otherwise be unable to access. Up until now, museums have been using PCs and Macs, but now they have the ability to use consoles. It caters for kids from the digital age and we can now meet their expectations when they go to museums. It takes it to a whole new level, but that will be a level children are comfortable with. It could revolutionise history.

Read full article (Coventry Telegraph, April 20, 2007)
Go to website Virtual Experience Company

The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara provides children with a tangible version of history in hands-on workshops. The workshops were launched to expand children’s appreciation for museums and cultural entities after they learn about them. In an effort to change the old museum mentality that suppressed children into silence when they were introduced to artifacts in a museum, children can now enjoy learning about history as well as culture by minting coins, laying mosaic tiles and excavating.

Read article (Today’s Zaman, April 21, 2007)