An exhibition about abuses of power can't stick to institutional limitations of what art is: @chaedria on why she gave protest flyers and other "ephemera" the same space as a Basquiat painting. Check here soon for the recorded version of her talk!
"You can't create something that's never existed using things you already have" - on the difficulty of re-inventing museums...
If curators want to reach new audiences, they have to become literate in the way these audiences experience art, rather than demanding these audiences learn institutional standards for experiencing art in museums...
But we have to reimagine the field, or else "it will not survive."
OMG - she had to fight to hang some things, because the Guggenheim hadn't put "ephemera" on its walls before. There's, like, a class system in what goes in cases versus on the walls? Arghghghghg.
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In 2021, a Nepali monastery told the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that the museum possessed a sacred painting stolen from the monastery in 1967. The museum responded by offering to give the monastery a replica... if they would sign away their rights to the original. A 🧵
In August 1967, the American scholar Mary Slusser photographed the painting during an annual festival at the Yempi Mahavihara (also known as I Baha) in Patan, Nepal. In September, , as her diary shows, a dealer offered it to her.
In Nepal's Buddhist communities, sacred artifacts like the painting are owned jointly by their worshippers. They cannot be sold. Slusser's other writings show she knew this, and knew that it was against Nepal's law to export such artifacts. Still, she bought it.
Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles.