from The Guardian
This epic Earth
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When artworks reach the scale of the monumental and beyond, then the question of conservation treatment becomes somewhat irrelevant. And this raises an interesting relationship between size and conservation methodology. It can be surmised that the scale of construction of an artefact would affect and impact on the choice of conservation treatments. However, to what extent? And more specifically - how? Such an explanation or exposition could perhaps help to make sense of the diverse concerns in the field of conservation such as museum artefacts, architectural, sites, monuments and even intangible heritage and digital materials.

from The New York Times
Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?
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from Justice Talking
Who Owns Art?
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listen to program (Windows Media Player required)

Following on from an earlier post on the Elgin Marbles debate, 2 other perspectives on how museums influence (or some might say distort) history.

from Discovery
Elgin Marbles Dispute Takes New Twist
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When a museum makes claims such as: "Only here can the worldwide significance of the sculptures be fully grasped", it can only signify a blindspot which fails to appreciate that the debate on "where historical artefacts should be" will always turn against the museum, as that is the place with the least connection and resonance to the actual context of most, if not all, historical artefacts.

from BBC News
Bidders to snap up mobile photos
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from Yahoo News
Nokia: Connect to Art!
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from Wired News
Cell Phones Work as Tour Guides
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The increasing prominence and use of the mobile phone in art- and heritage-related activities must definitely signal the coming of age of the mobile phone generation.

from The International Committee for Museums of Ethnography (ICME-ICOM)
Museums and Intangible Heritage
go to listing of papers

Several online papers that were presented during ICOM 2004 in Seoul are made available on the above web-page. It is also interesting to see how the concept of "Intangible Heritage", which is the theme for the ICOM meeting in Seoul, has begun to take off with increasing references made to it.

from The New York Times
Magic, Music and Toys That Talk Back
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What a fascinating collection of mechanical musical instruments and automatons! A magician removing his own head while a music box tinkles underneath, a magnificent peacock which shows you real feathers when you wind it up, chickens that lay eggs and moving rabbits and bears...All these are part of the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection that the Morris Museum in New Jersey recently acquired.

Much to my amusement and thought, the author of the article asked:

A collection of this scope and style raises questions about the nature of collecting itself. Who are these collectors, and what causes them to gather material like buttons, Barbies and Beanie Babies? Are they visionaries, engaged in everything from historical search and rescue to the scientific cataloguing of objects, or obsessives and pack rats who use the cachet of collecting to disguise hoarding and greed? Who needs all these music boxes, and what drives someone to buy them?

Later he muses:

The world is riddled with anxieties, and each day brings enough evidence of global horrors and local traumas to darken our dreams and dim our ideals. Some go mad under the pressure, others shut themselves off to avoid it. Still others take an active role in the attempt to transform their world, creating institutions or functioning in public life. But some people - and I suspect that Guinness was among them - deal with it all by creating a perfect imaginary world of order and control, where the collector is a kind of god...

So how do we relate to our collections and what is it that we are relating to at museum exhibitions?

SENI 2004 Festival of Arts

The SENI 2004 Festival of Arts, held in Singapore, is a visual arts festival of contemporary Southeast Asian and Asian art aimed at creating open channels of dialogue between Singapore and international artists.

Its symposium comprise of rousing dialogues that provides much food for thought as Singapore works towards the Singapore Biennale 2006. Some articles from the speakers at the symposium that could be downloaded at the SENI website :

Chaitanya Sambrani: Location and desire: siting the contemporary in Indian art

Desmond Hui: Defining the Contemporary: Public Art and Architecture

John Philips: The Contemporary

Jim Supangkat: Session III: Biennales, Institutions and State

Jose Tence Ruiz: Exchange, Accomodation, other Lubrications

Juliana Yasin: Conditions of Practice: Translocality and Simultaneity

Paul Rae: Deadweights of the Body Politic: Art, Space and the Contemporary

Rajeev S. Patke: Panel on ‘Looking Critically: Perspectives and Prospects’

from The New York Times
Devastation, Now Salvage, Page by Page
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A sad reminder of how a tiny spark can set off a whole disaster and the importance of good disaster-salvage planning. A fire, set off by a electrical short at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, has caused irreparably damage to about 10 percent of the library's collection of a million books.

"The texts in Weimar were of a special nature in that they had their own history," said Michael Knoche, the library's director since 1991, emphasizing their personal connections with the greats of German literature. "They were used by Goethe, Schiller and Wieland. They wrote on the book covers, or margins." Goethe was himself administrator of the library, which was established in 1691.

At present, the Library is preoccupied with concerns for rebuilding the Baroque library building and the book collection and the restoration of the damaged books. The immediate treatment of the damaged books is being carried out by the Center for Book Conservation in Leipzig and further restoration would depend on possibilities of financial support.

from Radio Singapore International
Touring the Lion-City : Heritage Conservation Centre
go to programme notes - Part 1 and Part 2 (in Chinese)
go to recordings - Part 1 and Part 2 (in Mandarin)

Two short radio programme in Mandarin featuring the work behind the scenes at the Heritage Conservation Centre.

from Smithsonian Magazine
Tunnel Visionary
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from New York Foundation for the Arts Quarterly - Fall 2003
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If one can be allowed to stereotype, then it can only be a New Yorker who is willing to devote a better part of her life to documenting urban ruin and dereliction as heritage. As Julia Solis new book (see a selection of images here) and web-site, Dark Passage, attest, it is both fascinating and mind-boggling to be engaged in this seemingly Herculean project of contemporary urban archaeology.

Julia Solis is also the Founder and Executive Director of Ars Subterranea which seeks to promote a greater understanding and awareness of the historic urban fabric of New York by organising creative projects. Aptly, Ars Subterranea has as its tag-line:"The Society for Creative Preservation". One of the recently completed project is a photographic presentation, entitled The Garden of Crumbling Delights, which is both an effort "to document America's rapidly vanishing ruins" and "a celebration of the beauty inherent in architectural decay" at the same time.