Israeli Arabs clean and repair graves at an old Muslim cemetery in downtown Jerusalem (Photo: AFP)
The Lebanese-based organization Hezbollah has denounced an Israeli project to build a museum on the site of a Muslim cemetery in west Jerusalem. Last week, the Supreme Court of Israel decided to give the Museum of Tolerance the go-ahead. The court found that the cemetery dates back 300 to 400 years but fell into disuse after Israel gained statehood in 1948. The court said that since there had been no objections in 1960, when the city built a parking lot over part of the cemetery, it would not block construction of the museum on the same property.
According to Agence France-Presse, Hezbollah spoke against “the profanation of a historical Muslim cemetery in occupied Jerusalem, a profanation authorized by the [Israeli] enemy, which has allowed an American company to build a museum on the site.” The Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein, also denounced “a serious decision” by the Israeli Supreme Court and noted that the building will destroy a Muslim holy site.
Ironically, the Center for Human Dignity - Museum of Tolerance, which has been designed by Frank Gehry, is to be dedicated to promoting tolerance among peoples. The official website calls it “a place that will remind us that greater than any external threat is the internal divide that separates us”. The 3-acre campus will include two museums, a library-education center, a conference center and a 500-seat performing arts theater. The estimated cost of the project is $250 million
Artist’s rendering of Frank Gehry-designed Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem
Take a virtual tour of the museum
Read more:
Israeli court OKs Museum of Tolerance’s controversial branch (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008)
Hezbollah against Gehry Museum in Jerusalem (Artforum.com, Nov 3, 2008)
Arabs rally against building Tolerance Museum atop Muslim cemetery (Ha’aretz, Nov 6, 2008)
Palestinians protest at Israeli plan to build museum on Muslim (Independent, Nov 6, 2008)
Palestinians protest against Museum of Tolerance planned over (Telegraph.co.uk, Nov 6, 2008)
This entry was written by , posted on november 8, 2008 at 3:04 pm, filed under Culture, Ethics, Heritage, History, Middle-East, Museum. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands is a website set up to preserve the memory of all those who were persecuted as Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War and who did not survive the Shoah. The Digital Monument is an initiative of the late Professor Emeritus Ies Lipschits, but the responsibility for it was transferred to the Jewish Historical Museum.
Each individual has been given his or her own personal page to which photographs, documents and biographical information can be posted. The Monument also helps surviving relatives to explore their roots and visitors to the website are invited to send in corrections to any mistakes and to provide any additional information they may have.
The home page has been designed to look like a real monument to commemorate all those whose names are included in the Digital Monument. Every coloured dot stands for one person. The colours indicate whether the person was a man (blue) or woman (red), a boy or girl between 6 and 21 years of age (green and yellow, respectively) or a child under 6 years of age (light blue or pink). Clicking a dot opens the personal page of the person concerned.
Members of the same family have been placed together. For most of the families, addresses are known. Clicking on a family’s address will take you to the address page for that family. To the left and right you will see the Jewish families who lived closest to them. Clicking on the address of one of the ‘neighbours’ will take you to that family. In this way you can take a virtual walk down the street or through the neighbourhood, village, or city.
The page of Ruth Emilie Sollinger lists several of her personal documents from the Documents Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum. You can also go on a virtual tour of the house of the Jewish De Jongh family lived at 133 Spanjaardslaan in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, before their deportation to Auschwitz in November 1942 where all family members died. The virtual tour allows you to roam through the empty rooms, and provides an overview of all objects that were listed in an inventory before being removed by the Nazi’s.
Go to The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands
This entry was written by , posted on oktober 12, 2008 at 1:08 pm, filed under Culture, Ethics, Europe, Heritage, History, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
A Georgian woman leaves her damaged home in Gori . (Photo: REUTERS)
The director of the Josef Stalin museum in Gori, Georgia, says he had to flee to the capital of Tbilisi in his car loaded with authentic items from the museum during the Russian bombing of the country.
Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, was the first to be attacked by Russian troops in the brief war in August that followed a Georgian incursion into the pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, located just north of Gori. The town of 50,000 was also occupied by Russian troops during the conflict until August 22.
Interestingly, South Ossetia amd Abkhazia were definitively given to Georgia when the Soviet Union was formed, by Stalin’s decision. Those who insist that those territories must be returned to Russia consider themselves victims of Stalin’s rule of terror and therefore demand a return to the pre-revolutionary situation.
The institution, officially opened in 1959, is comprised of three buildings which circle Gori’s main square. With plenty of official portraits of the former leader, the museum also features the tiny brick and wood house on its grounds in which Soviet leader and dictator Josef Stalin was born in 1879.
During recent events the museum escaped relatively unscathed, save for a few smashed windows and lots of dust in the halls. Officials say the museum — which gets up to 25,000 visitors a year — is expected to re-open on September 8.
Each year, supporters of Soviet leader Josef Stalin hold a memmorial service for him outside the Stalin Museum, 80 kilometers from Tbilisi in Stalin’s hometown of Gori.
Read more (CBC News, September 1, 2008)
Visit website Stalin Museum
This entry was written by , posted on september 3, 2008 at 9:34 pm, filed under Ethics, Europe, Heritage, History, Museum. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Dutch Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), headed by architect Rem Koolhaas, has been commissioned to oversee the transformation of an early 20th-century industrial complex in Milan into the Fondazione Prada’s (Prada Foundation) new headquarters. An auditorium, a tower and an exhibition building will be added to the seven existing structures and courtyard, creating a total of 188,000 square feet of space for shows, including an innovative hybrid storage and- display area (see picture below). Strangely enough, one of the images that were released by Prada and OMA, resembles a widely discussed work by the American artist Tom Sachs.
Two years ago Fondazione Prada hosted a large-scale solo-show with works by the artist who repeatedly uses the Prada brand as the target for his artistic attacks. In 1998 he created his highly controversial Prada Deathcamp, a miniature replica of a concentration camp made from Prada’s distinctive navy blue hatboxes and emblazoned with the company logo (see picture below). The piece even included an entrance gate inscribed with the ominous motto’ Arbeit macht frei’ (that for Sachs, perhaps, equates to an advertising slogan?) and a model of the ‘incinerator’ from the Treblinka Nazi death camp.
According to the artist, however, Prada Deathcamp had nothing to do with the holocaust, but was instead intended to be a denouncement of the way shopping had been turned into a new form of religion. In an ironic twist of history, the very place where Sachs showed his “piece of resistance” will now be transformed by the architect who prophesied that “shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity”.
Design for Prada Foundation’s new headquarters by OMA
Prada Deathcamp (1998) by the American artist Tom Sachs
This entry was written by , posted on juli 31, 2008 at 12:40 pm, filed under Architecture, Art, Ethics, Museum. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Italian bishops and government representatives think Kippenberg’s ‘Zuerst die Füße’ is provocative.
A one-metre high sculpture of a crucified frog, holding a mug of beer and an egg, at a modern art museum in Italy has stirred controversy in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Bolzano. ‘Zuerst die Füße’ by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger is part of an exhibition at Bolzano’s Museion, which opened last May.
Kippenberg, who died in 1997 aged 44, was a painter, sculptor and photographer. Several exhibitions of his work have been held posthumously, including a show at the Tate Modern in London in 2006. His alter ego “Fred the Frog”, who appears on canvas and in sculpture alike, is at the same time a comic stand-in for Jesus, and as a spoof on all religious fervor. In this case Fred the Frog is hammered (literally and figuratively) to a crucifix with a beer stein in his hand.
No matter his cult hero status, the controversy around his sculpture continues unabated. As Der Standard reports, Franz Pahl—an elected government representative for the South Tyrol regional government—is continuing a hunger strike to protest the work’s continued exhibition at the museum’s new facilities According to the newspaper, Pahl promises to end his strike only when the sculpture is removed.
Read more on Artforum.com
This entry was written by , posted on at 12:16 am, filed under Art, Ethics, Europe, Exhibition, Museum, USA, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Museums are at the frontline of hostilities against works of art. Last sunday, a £6,000 sculpture on display at the Royal Academy in London, was smashed. A visitor fell into a cordoned-off area, knocking the work to the floor where it broke into hundreds of pieces. The 9ft ceramic sculpture, called Christina, was one of five by Costa Rican artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez on display at a show that was curated by artist Tracey Emin.
Before the fall … Tracey Emin stands in front of Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez’s artwork Frauleins Christina, Panthea, Zenobia, Semiramis and Guinevere at the Royal Academy. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty
In London and beyond, the incident has again raised the uncomfortable question of providing security for priceless art in public settings. Over the years a price has been paid for accessibility. In January 2006 a a man tripped over his shoelaces at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge and smashed a magnificent Qing dynasty vase. And during the 70’s and 80’s a series of violent attacks on works of art took place.
One of the most scandalous attacks occurred in 1972, when a Hungarian man attacked Michelangelo’s ”Pieta” in St. Peter’s Basilica, striking it 10 times with a hammer. In 1975 Rembrandt’s ”Night Watch” was slashed with a bread knife at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Acid was thrown at another Rembrandt, ”The Danae” at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1985.
In 1986, a tall, brown-haired man walked into the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and repeatedly slashed ”Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III,” (see below) a masterpiece by the American artist Barnett Newman. He served five months in jail and three months on parole. However, in 1997 he returned to the museum and slashed another work by Newman with a small knife.
Barnett Newmans restored ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III’ at the Stedelijk Museum.
Examples of damage caused by museum visitors, both accidentaly and purposely, are few and far between. Works of art stand a far greater chance of being destroyed at the hands of curators, picture handlers or cleaners. Most of the major museums have had to issue shame-faced apologies for breakages at one time or another.
In 2001, a delicate shell-shaped glass sculpture by the US artist Dale Chihuly, valued at £35,000, was smashed by a contractor setting up for an evening function at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Four years ago, a rubbish bag which formed part of an installation by Gustav Metzger, entitled Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, was innocently gathered up by a cleaner at Tate Britain and thrown into a crusher.
Earlier this year, National Gallery handlers dropped a painting by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi. Made on a panel composed of three planks of timber, the painting broke along a joint. And at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this month, a security guard found a 15th-century terracotta relief sculpture of Saint Michael the Archangel by the Italian artist Andrea della Robbia on the floor; it had apparently come loose from its wall-mounted frame during the night. The masterpiece survived miraculously, but apparently not all museums have a guardian angel to protect their precious belongings.
Italian Renaissance sculptor Andrea della Robbia’s “Saint Michael the Archangel” fell off a wall at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and was damaged.
Read more in The Guardian, July 28 and July 30, 2008.
This entry was written by , posted on juli 30, 2008 at 11:21 pm, filed under Art, Ethics, Europe, Museum, USA. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and his Monogramouflage canvases and signature bags for French fasion brand Louis Vuitton. These limited edition items were on display last year at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and are now the subject of a lawsuit.
A luxury boutique in the middle of an art exhibition was supposed to be controversial, but not a legal matter. The temporary retail space allowed in October by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles has become the center of litigation, though. A law suit by an L.A. collector alleges that Louis Vuitton failed to take the law into account when selling limited-edition prints by Japanese Pop artist Takashi Murakami at his show at the museum’s Geffen Contemporary.
The 500 Murakami prints that were on sale for an average of $8,000 lacked the ironclad certification required, making them less valuable for resale. A museum spokeswoman said that officials would reserve comment while reviewing the suit. Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton said in a statement that the collector’s suit is “baseless litigation,” and that he refused the company’s offer of a refund plus interest.
The artist retrospective, Vuitton store included, is now at the Brooklyn Museum in New York till July 13.
Read more
Los Angeles Times (July 3, 2008)
Los Angeles Times (June 25, 2008)
This entry was written by , posted on juli 4, 2008 at 12:31 pm, filed under Art, Business, Ethics, Museum, North-America. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Butyrka (Butyrskaya tyurma), a notorious czarist and Soviet-era prison near central Moscow that, according to some, could be turned into a museum in commemoration of the victims of Soviet-era repression.
The International Herald Tribune reports that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has urged the creation of a national museum and memorial to honor victims of Soviet-era repression and to document their demise. A statement announcing the initiative, signed by Gorbachev and about 25 rights activists and cultural figures, said “the current and future generations need memory and knowledge of the repressions of the Stalin regime,” which it said left few families untouched. (more…)
This entry was written by , posted on juni 10, 2008 at 5:17 pm, filed under Ethics, Europe, Heritage, History, Museum. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The Iraqi National Museum has reclaimed 701 artefacts that were stolen during looting in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The news was covered by media from around the world:
Stolen treasures returned to Iraq’s museum (People’s Daily Online, 29 Apr 2008)
Treasures returned to Iraq museum (Kazinform, 28 Apr 2008)
Stolen treasures returned to Iraq’s museum (Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Apr 2008)
Iraqi museum receives 701 artifacts stolen during looting (Aljazeera.com, 27 Apr 2008)
Treasures returned to Iraq museum (BBC, 27 Apr 2008)
Iraqi National Museum receives 701 artifacts stolen in wake of Saddam Hussein’s ouster (International Herald Tribune, 27 Apr 2008)
Baghdad museum receives artifacts stolen from Iraq (Washington Post, 27 Apr 2008)
Read more Baghdad Museum news (The Baghdad Museum Project)
This entry was written by , posted on april 29, 2008 at 3:41 pm, filed under Culture, Ethics, Heritage, Middle-East, Museum and tagged Baghdad, Baghdad Museum, BBC, International Herald Tribune, Iraq, Iraq Museum, Iraq's museum, Iraqi National Museum, National Museum, Saddam Hussein, Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
And yet another example of the ungoing efforts to capture the horrors of Nazi-Germany in a museum context. Last week the German government started construction of an exhibition center in Berlin at the site where the Gestapo, leaders of the SS and other top officials in Adolf Hitler’s police state presided over Nazi-era crimes in the period from 1933 to 1945.
The so-called Topography of Terror (German: Topographie des Terrors) started as an outdoor museum in 1987 and in 1993, an architectural competition for a museum building was won by the design of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. However, the project was cancelled due to technical and financial reasons. In 2006 the Berlin office Heinle, Wischer und Partner won a new competition for the documentation and visitors’ center. It should be opened on May 8, 2010, the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s final surrender.
A hand points at a detail of a scale model of a new building for the ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition. (AP Photo/Miguel Villagran)
The single-story, glass-fronted pavilion, designed by German architect Ursula Wilms, should be ready in 2010. (Heinle, Wischer und Partner)
Read article (Yahoo/AP, November 2, 2007)
Go to website Topography of Terror
This entry was written by , posted on november 4, 2007 at 11:48 pm, filed under Ethics, Heritage, Museum and tagged Adolf Hitler's police, Berlin, German government, Germany, Gestapo, Miguel Villagran, Peter Zumthor, the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany's final surrender, Ursula Wilms, Yahoo. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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