Lines are forming at dawn outside the National Gallery here with a tenacious public patiently hoping to get the only 500 tickets a day not sold in advance for its blockbuster exhibition, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.”
The advance tickets, which went on sale online in May, sold out the first week the show opened, prompting box-office Web sites to start scalping $25 tickets for up to $400.
From the University Products blog:
Today, on the 176th birthday of one of the America’s most famous and mysterious authors of all time, we would like to talk to you about book preservation…We have collected some wonderful resources to help you identify, care for and preserve the literary treasures you may possess…
Visitors to the grave of the Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde won’t be able to leave a permanent mark on his tomb anymore. Since the ’90s, mostly women started leaving lipstick kisses on his tomb in Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery, a gentle memento for a writer who didn’t show much regard for women.
The problem was that cleaning off those kisses was damaging the stone.
“Disfiguring white stuff on artifacts and artworks can be the result of a wide range of causes. These are referred to by a variety of terms including: efflorescence, bloom, fatty bloom, spue, blushing, chalking, blanching, haze, dust, grime, salts, mold, transferred images, crizzling, sweating and patina.”
“According to their manifesto, Occupy Museums is dissatisfied with the general cultural elitism of the art world and pandering to rich trustees that museums often must go through in order to be given donations to make ends meet.”
Smithsonian spokesman John Gibbons said a large group of demonstrators, estimated at 100 to 200 people, arrived at about 3 p.m. and tried to enter the National Mall museum. When a security guard stopped group members from entering, saying they could not bring in signs, he was apparently held by demonstrators, Gibbons said.
Are you a registrar, collections manager, archivist, conservator, or curator that spends a lot of time working with collections? If so—and if you haven’t already—you should join the listserv for the Registrar’s Committee of the American Association of Museums (RCAAM Listserv). If you are ever stumped by a collections conundrum, 9 times out of 10 there is someone on the listserv that can help. It’s like having consultants on every possible museum topic on retainer. For free!
In a city where hundreds of people died, thousands of homes were destroyed, jobs are gone and schools and businesses closed, the preservation of an art museum just doesn’t rank at the top of the must-do list.
Namibian tribal leaders took possession Friday of the skulls of 20 of their countrymen, taken by German colonial forces more than a century ago for racial experiments…Once the remains arrived in Berlin, between 1909-1914, scientists tried to prove the “racial superiority” of white Europeans over black Africans by analyzing the facial features of the heads, said Thomas Schnalke, the head of the Berlin Medical Historical Museum.
