Tate Modern has entered into an extensive partnership with investment bank UBS, under which the museum will showcase works from the bank’s extensive art collection. But as much as Tate Modern may need UBS’s money, doesn’t such a deal indicate a betrayal of the museum’s core mission? “Tate Modern belongs to the British people. Its space cannot be sold, its codes must not be breached simply because the government doesn’t care to support it as it should.” An article on this issue already appeared on sunday and was cited by the ArtsJournal the same day, but the content is to important to leave unnoticed here.

Read full article (The Observer, May 13, 2007)

[photopress:muse_02_03.gif,full,pp_image]

Last sunday the American Association of Museums announced the winners of the 2007 MUSE Awards recognizing excellence in all varieties of media programs produced by or for museums. Among the innovative projects to receive a prize were an animated Native American folktale, a weekly science news podcast, a sunken treasure map game, a Chicago blues audio tour, a butterfly habitat simulator, an opportunity to play photojournalist on a breaking story and a stock-market simulator game .

The MUSE Awards, now in their 18th year, are open to entries from museums around the world, and besides American museums three of the gold medal winners in the 11 categories were museums in Mexico City; Taipei, Taiwan; and Melbourne, Australia.

A complete list of the 2007 MUSE Award winners and judging criteria is available on the Web site of the American Association of Museums.
Read the press release

[photopress:vanabbemuseum_1.jpg,full,pp_image]

On Saturday 2 June 2007, the Van Abbemuseum will organize a Museum Night, entitled ‘Art Closer to People - People Closer to Art.’ This ‘night’ starts at 5 pm, and will go on until 2 am. There will be a showcase of performances, lectures, tours and other interventions. The night is free of charge.

Amsterdam was the first city in the Netherlands to host a city wide Museum Night in 2000. Each year around 40 museums, including household names as the Van Gogh Museum, Stedelijk Museum and Rijksmuseum, open their doors to 26.000 people, of whom more than 60% are younger than 35 years old. Other cities in the Netherlands that host Museum Nights are Rotterdam and Utrecht (although Utrecht did not organize one in 2006). The Hague has its TodaysArt, which encompasses all forms of art and culture.

Dutch Museum Nights have proven to be good platforms for museums to present themselves to a new audience. Critics often introduce the term McMuseum in their reviews, but museums are generally more than satisfied with the experiment. In Amsterdam those 26.000 people visit on average 4.4 museums on one night, which results in a staggering 114,400 museum visits in 7 hours.

Full programme
Website Van Abbemuseum

[photopress:jackie_malraux_1.jpg,full,pp_image]

An article on artforum.com signals a “radical new vision” by newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Artforum cites left-wing Le Monde’s Christophe Jakubyszyn, who reports “a hard-hitting reform that promises to redefine several ministries and even eliminate the ministry of culture.”

Right-wing morning daily Le Figaro on the other hand, denies the fusion of the Ministries of Cultural Affairs and Educaction.

Read full article (Artforum, May 15, 2007)
Read full article (Le Figaro, May 15, 2007)

[photopress:milgram_1_2_3.jpg,full,pp_image]

The recent discussion whether the new Dutch National History Museum should be built in Amsterdam or The Hague, has been hijacked by cities that say history did not take place in one city, according to Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Instead of one central museum, a network of buildings and sites should show and reenact history. An augmented experience of history is their goal, either by implementing new technology or by showing traditional historic practices. “History must be made perceptible”, says Kees van Twist of the Groninger Museum. And this should be done in a decentralized cluster across the country, according to people like Charles Jeurgens, head of the Dordrecht city archives, since “it is a characteristic of the Netherlands that the birth of the state, nation and religion took place in various places.”

Other countries who face the same problems, should follow this unfolding discussion in the Netherlands. Not only is it good at winning land from water, but with the highest number of museums per capita in the world, it is also an expert at making heritage from history.

Since we can’t receive BBC2 in the Netherlands (and because I am crossing Europe by train at the moment), I wasn’t able to watch the first episode of The Museum: the 10-part BBC TV series about the British Museum that started last friday. Unfortunately neither the BBC nore the museum itself is offering the possibility to (re)watch this series that gives viewers a peek behind the scenes of one of the world’s great museums. Interested people who live outside the UK, like myself, therefore will have to wait for a release on DVD or for their national broadcasting corporations to buy and show the series. This is a missed opportunity for a selfproclaimed ‘universal museum’ and something that a global media organisation simply can’t sustain. Especially since the first episode got a positive feedback from both the official media and several bloggers.

In the Guardian, TV critic Sam Wollaston described the staff members of the museum that appeared on the programme as “real enthusiasts, unperturbed by the modern world, doing their thing, immersed in the past, year after year”. He seemed a bit disappointed that the BBC wasn’t going “behind the scenes of a busy restaurant, into a steamy kitchen full of sexy young people swearing at each other”, but his overall opinion was fairly possitive. John Anson, another journalist from the Lancashire Telegraph, hesitantly admitted that there was “something almost mesmerising watching art restorer Karen who has spent six years of her life working on an Egyptian wall painting”. One blogger predicts a successful continuation of this insiders’ guide to the mother of all museums and says that by “portraying it as unstuffy and ‘normal’ as possible the BBC may have a small ‘hit’ on its hands”.

Hopefully this broad support from British viewers will persuade the BBC to make the series more widely accessible (online). That might also help Neil MacGregor, director of the museum, to convince an international audience of the museum’s universal reach and legitimacy. If I was living in Athens, Cairo or Baghdad at the moment, it would probably make a big difference if I could watch the people who are taking care of my national cultural heritage as they perform their daily duties. Perhaps the BBC and the British Museum eventually even could collaborate with other museums who share the same difficulties in reaching the moral heirs of their collections. And if the BBC refuses to participate the museums can always team up with Al-Jazeera.

Go to website The British Museum
Read what the Guardian has to say about The Museum
Read an interview with Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum (The Sunday Times, May 6, 2007)

[photopress:georgeaugustus385_166213a.jpg,full,pp_image]

The Times reports that one of the world’s most important collections of human remains has been lost to science, after the Natural History Museum gave up the specimens without first carrying out work that would have preserved vital clues to evolution. Bones and teeth from 17 Tasmanian Aborigines were handed over to a community group yesterday, after the museum dropped plans for a final research programme.

Read full article (The Times, May 12, 2007)
Go to website Natural History Museum

[photopress:open12.jpg,full,pp_image]

The new OPEN, a bi-annual journal about art and the public domain, deals with regulation and privatization of intellectual property and public space. Originally in Dutch, it also has an English version. Some of its articles can be read online.

OPEN website

[photopress:archive_3.0_1.jpg,full,pp_image]

There is too much going on right now, I can hardly keep up. It is exhilarating, inspiring and jaw dropping to see the amount of knowledge and insight on the future of culture flowing around the web. Here is another example of such research and experimentation, recently undertaken at Stanford University.

[photopress:EOL_1.jpg,full,pp_image]

A group of the world’s leading scientists announced yesterday that they had joined forces to document the world’s 1.8 million named species in a massive new “Encyclopedia of Life.”

The unprecedented $12.5 million effort — a collaboration of Chicago’s Field Museum, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass., the Smithsonian Institution, the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Missouri Botanical Garden — aims to create separate Web pages on every known species within a decade.

Read full article (Washington Post, May 9, 2007)
EOL website