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From The China Post

Madrid’s top three museums — the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza — received a record number of visitors last year as blockbuster exhibits drew crowds despite a weak economy.

The private Thyssen-Bornemisza, which displays works by artists ranging from El Greco to Picasso, posted the biggest rise in visitor numbers of the three museums that make up the Spanish capital’s so-called “Golden Triangle of Art.”

It drew 1,070,390 visitors, a 30.4 percent jump over the previous year and the biggest number since the museum opened its doors in 1992.

The rise is due to the success of the seven temporary exhibits it held last year, longer opening hours and an increase in the number of visitors to Madrid, the museum’s director general Miguel Angel Recio said.

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Workers excavate a 1,700-year old brick tomb in China's Jiangsu province. But often thieves get there first, sometimes just bulldozing their way in. Photo by the AP

By Tania Branigan from theguardian

China’s extraordinary historical treasures are under threat from increasingly aggressive and sophisticated tomb raiders, who destroy precious archaeological evidence as they swipe irreplaceable relics.

The thieves use dynamite and even bulldozers to break into the deepest chambers – and night vision goggles and oxygen canisters to search them. The artefacts they take are often sold on within days to international dealers.

Police have already stepped up their campaign against the criminals and the government is devoting extra resources to protecting sites and tracing offenders. This year it set up a national information centre to tackle such crimes.

Tomb theft is a global problem that has gone on for centuries. But the sheer scope of China’s heritage – with thousands of sites, many of them in remote locations – poses a particular challenge.

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The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum incorporates 3-D technology to document the designer’s 50-year career.

By Suzy Menkes from The New York Times

“To be called pioneers for what we have done — and at our age!” says Giancarlo Giammetti, referring to the opening this week of the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum.

A legion of models in the designer’s signature “Valentino red” act as an online teaser for a downloadable desktop application at http://valentino-garavani-archives.org. It was designed to go live during a news conference being given by Mr. Giammetti and Mr. Garavani, longtime partners both in their late 70s. The news conference will be live-streamed from New York on Monday.

Instead of the static exhibitions in brick-and-mortar museums so familiar to fashion icons, the Valentino duo has used immersive 3-D technology to present archives spanning 50 years, including nearly 100 fashion shows on video, 5,000 dresses, the original working sketches from the designer’s hand and photographs of the clothes, the celebrities who wore them and a vision of the world of Valentino.

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Image by Corentin Fohlen for The New York Times

By Edward Rothstein from The New York Times

You walk through a garden lush with overgrowth, a cultivated wilderness with exotic grasses gone deliberately to seed. Inside the effect is the same: You enter the eerily atmospheric hall where you meander past artifacts from Oceania, Africa and other realms beyond Europe’s borders, as speckled daylight seeps through window scrims decorated with forest foliage. The displays are lush with miscellany: here, an ivory statuette of a goddess from the Tonga islands that once was shown in an 18th-century curiosity cabinet; there, a desiccated human skull, covered in black-colored beeswax, acquired in early-20th-century Papua New Guinea.

But wait: before trying to decipher this strange universe, at the Musée du Quai Branly, consider another, elsewhere in Paris. Only here the impression is of vast, arching spaces and skylights that cast no shadows. You readily recognize the iconography of church portals, pilasters and statuary. It looks as if entire facades had been amputated from cathedrals all over France in a wild species of plunder. Here are the intricately ornamented arches of a 12th-century church in Saintes; there, ornate 16th-century doors from the cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. Centuries of grotesque, open-mouthed gargoyles are poised on a wall overhead, as if prepared to spew venomous rainwater.

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Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

By Hugh Eakin from The New York Review of Books

I recently had the chance to see an extraordinary new exhibition space devoted to the arts of Islam. The collection included works in stone, metal, glass, ivory, and textile, as well as illuminated manuscripts, and spanned from Moorish Spain and Umayyad Syria to the Central Asian steppe and Safavid Iran; the pieces were mostly of a quality that might be worthy of any great world institution. Readers may at this point guess I am talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s just-reopened Islamic galleries. Actually, I was visiting a museum in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.

Like the new Met galleries, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, the Qatari capital, attempts to provide a comprehensive view of its subject; the two museums even feature a number of nearly identical works — inlaid wood panels from Medieval Cairo; the Ferman, or signature, of Suleyman the Magnificent; carved marble acanthus capitals from 10th-century Cordoba; ceramic bowls from Nishapur in the uncannily modernist “black-on-white” style. But there the similarities end. Whereas the Met amassed objects like these over the course of more than a century, in Doha, the collection was built from scratch in less than a decade. For all its grandeur, it is as new as the artificial island the museum is sitting on.

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