Author Archive for emily

From The Economist…

The funniest part of the CNSNews.com article that ultimately got David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” pulled from the National Portrait Gallery last week is the sensitive-content notice at the top: “WARNING: This story contains graphic photographs of items on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.” What’s in those graphic photographs? Mostly, the rather familiar (though still powerful and disturbing) image of a thin, nearly naked man nailed to a wooden cross, bleeding from open wounds. A lot of ants are crawling on the crucifix, but you can’t make them out in the web images. There are a couple of images of other naked guys further down in the article, but of course those aren’t the images that generated any controversy; nobody ever wound up pressuring the Smithsonian to pull Larry Rivers’s portrait of John O’Hara wearing nothing but his motorcycle boots. The web article’s author, a conservative activist named Penny Starr, was clearly trying to gin up some late-80s-style culture-war outrage at the idea that the Smithsonian was sponsoring an exhibit of gay artists. But the part of the story that proved to have legs, once the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue decided to pick it up and got it endorsed by John Boehner, was the part about the crucifix with the ants crawling on it. More…

From The New York Times…

For the second time in three years Yale University and the government of Peru have reached a tentative agreement on the return of a large group of artifacts excavated in 1912 at Machu Picchu by a Yale explorer.

Peru has argued that the items were only lent to the university and should have been returned long ago. Yale has contended that it returned all borrowed objects in the 1920s, retaining only those to which it had full title. In 2007 the sides reached a tentative agreement that would have set up a long-term collaboration and granted title of the disputed antiquities to Peru while allowing a certain number to remain at Yale for study and display. But that deal fell apart in 2008, and Peru filed suit in federal court in Connecticut. It also recently threatened to pursue criminal charges against Yale. And earlier this month Alan García, the president of Peru, formally requested the White House’s intervention in the dispute. More…

From Edward Rothstein at The New York Times…

Walk into a crowded museum, and what do you see? People with cameras or cellphones snapping pictures of people looking at objects. The artwork, document or fossil is a tourist site; the photograph is our souvenir. And the looking — for which museums were created — becomes a memory before it has even begun.

Now something else is in play that may distance the museum experience even further — though it intends to do just the opposite. During the last week I have walked through galleries, half-looking at objects and half-consulting an iPhone screen.

I have swiped, tapped and maneuvered in iSpace while negotiating Egyptian sarcophagi, Matisse paintings and Apatosaurus bones. I have searched for item IDs, audio-tour-guide numbers and tagged thumbnail images while trying to get information about Pacific Islanders or Picasso. I have used museum apps to help me navigate museums. But I have generally felt used along the way, forced into rigid paths, looking at minimalist text bites, glimpsing possibilities while being thwarted by realities. More…