Monthly Archive for July, 2011

Announcing the Winner of the International Award for Excellence

Published on July 27, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Congratulations to Donald Dunham the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the inclusive museum field with his paper Inclusivity, Objectivity, and The Ideal: The Museum as Utopian Space

At first glance the contemporary “Cabinet of Curiosities” appears to provide all the necessary ingredients for inclusion into the utopic environment: the museum program generally provides access to all, a scholarly objectivity in the display of curated artifacts, and, in exhibit design, the object displayed “ideally.”

The museum as an “ideal” venue (outside the intended or original context) for select objects, for example, can be decoded through the British Museum’s neo-classical pedimented entry as well as through the Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 International Style structure designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone as an embodiment of the Modernist Utopian ideology.

However, not all museum structures, spaces, and installation furniture appear to fit the utopian template. Daniel Libeskind’s deconstructivist Jewish Museum in Berlin does not conjure up “perfect worlds,” in fact quite the opposite. Nevertheless, within the dystopian shadow of history lie the roots of Libeskind’s discontinuous void: the survival and rebirth of a broken people, a concept also found in the utopian work of the Russian Constructivists.

This paper examines the museum as a utopian space; using case studies and contrasting museum agendas, “The Ideal” is explored and challenged as prerequisite in the planning and maintenance of museum space.

One Math Museum, Many Variables

Published on July 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Kenneth Chang from The New York Times

For everyone who finds mathematics incomprehensible, boring, pointless, or all of the above, Glen Whitney wants to prove you wrong.

He believes that tens of thousands of visitors will flock to his Museum of Mathematics, to open in Manhattan next year, and leave invigorated about geometry, numbers and many more mathematical notions.

“We want to expose the breadth and the beauty of mathematics,” said Mr. Whitney, a former math professor who parlayed his quantitative skills into a job at a Long Island hedge fund. He quit in late 2008 with connections to deep pockets and a quest to make math fun and cool.

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Koreans Celebrate Return of Looted Books by France

Published on July 14, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Image Courtesy of the AP

From The Korea Times

South Korea on Saturday celebrated the return of ancient Korean royal books from France with a procession, traditional ceremonies and performances that involved more than 1,000 officials and local residents.

The celebrations came after the final batch of the 297-volume “Oegyujanggak” books arrived in South Korea late last month. The texts, featuring protocols of royal ceremonies and rites from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), were looted by French troops in 1866 when they invaded Ganghwa Island in retaliation for Koreans’ persecution of French Catholic missionaries.

The books had been kept at an ancient royal library, known as Oegyujanggak, on the island located west of Seoul from the late 18th century.

The celebrations took place in and around the site of the ancient library, starting with a 1-kilometer procession from Ganghwasanseong Fortress to Oegyujanggak that reenacted the books’ transfer to the library in the 18th century. More than 500 people took part in the parade, including residents of the county of Ganghwa, located on the island, as well as soldiers, students and actors. They escorted palanquins carrying copies of the ancient books, as the original texts are now being stored at the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.

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Hungarian Natural History Under Threat

Published on July 7, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Image Courtesy of N. Bauer, HNHM

By Marian Turner from nature.com

Looking for a new home: 200 human mummies from the eighteenth century, the remains of rare European dinosaurs and 10 million other artefacts currently at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, which is facing eviction later this year. The Hungarian government plans to turn the historic Budapest building given to the museum after the fall of communism in 1989 into a university to train the military or the police.

Scientists in Hungary and abroad are shocked by the move because the imposing 1836 Ludovika building has been extensively renovated for the museum, and curators are still moving the collections in. They say that the museum has not been offered an alternative site, and fear that the collections will have to be stored in crates until a new home is found.

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