France, home to some of the world’s great art, is trying a six-month experiment. If museums are free, culture officials wonder, will they attract the kind of people who would usually rather watch television?
Starting Jan. 1, 14 French museums and monuments, most of them low-profile, will open to visitors free of charge for six months, Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Tuesday. Three are in Paris — Guimet, home to Asian art; Cluny, with a collection of medieval treasures; and Arts et Metiers, dedicated to scientific inventions. Their full-price tickets range from €6.50 ($9.27) to €7.50 ($10.70).
Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy campaigned for free museums before his May election, and the idea has stirred debate in France’s culture world since then, with critics asking whether it’s merely a superficial way of addressing the profound, decades-old question of how to democratize culture.
Another underlying question is how France — proclaimed by its prime minister to be in “a state of bankruptcy” — could afford the measure.
Albanel, who has been skeptical in the past about free museums, said officials would study the experiment’s results and decide how to proceed.
An entire museum burnt to the ground, complete with all of its exhibits: it is a nightmare that has become reality for the director of the Armando Museum in the Dutch town of Amersfoort. As if this wasn’t bad enough, works on loan from other museums and collectors have also gone up in flames. For Armando, the Dutch artist to whose work the museum is devoted, the fire is nothing short of a disaster.
n8 keeps on customizing the museums of Amsterdam. Its newest service is the ‘n8 van‘, an individual selection of events and activities taken from the complete program of 42 museums. Anyone can make his personal Museum Night program. It will then automatically generate an embed code so that people can show their selection on their blogs or Hyves page. Another viral museum campaign brought to you by the people of n8 and Grrr.
Pascal Cotte with a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
The Mona Lisa’s famously enigmatic smile was originally wider and more expressive, according to new scans of the painting.
Pascal Cotte, a French engineer, used a self-designed digital camera to uncover what he claimed were 25 secrets about Leonardo’s da Vinci’s portrait.
Mr Cotte said his 240-megapixel scans revealed traces of Mona Lisa’s left eyebrow, obliterated by long-ago restoration efforts.
“The face of the Mona Lisa appears slightly wider and the smile is different and the eyes are different. The smile is more accentuated,” Mr Cotte told the Live Science website.
In the era of movies with elaborate special effects and video games with graphics that cause players to marvel at the feeling of being inside the game, its no wonder museums are scrambling to keep up. For many, the answer to a more sophisticated audience and one with, perhaps, a shorter attention span is interactivity and immersion. Science and childrens museums have long trafficked in hands-on, sensory experiences. Now, with improved technology, the experiential exhibit is reaching new heights and turning up in a variety of venues.
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Posted by Juha van 't Zelfde
