Ill-gotten gains: how many museums have stolen objects in their collections?
Met’s move to return two statues to Cambodia among many disputed objects worldwide
Ill-gotten gains: how many museums have stolen objects in their collections?
Met’s move to return two statues to Cambodia among many disputed objects worldwide
Watch These Beetles Tear the Feathers off a Parrot
Sometimes you just want a skeleton. Especially if you’re a museum. So how do you get the meat off the bones of an animal? Well, if you’re the Natural History Museum in London, beetles, apparently. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.
Video: Natural History Museum
Ed note: There was a time when beetles ate dinosaurs.
The Dallas Museum of Art is getting smart, offering to trade the technical/programmatic expertise of an accredited American museum for the temporary exchange of cultural treasures of museums in places where standards of care, conservation and programmatic dialogue are at a standstill. Article linked above.
This is very cool.
3dprinted: 3D printing being used to restore ancient artefacts from Beijing’s Forbidden City. The Forbidden City’s Palace Museum is undergoing major restoration work, involving thousands of individual relics, funded by the Chinese government. Traditionally, objects needed to be measured, photographed and repaired using manual techniques - an extremely time consuming and expensive task. However, Loughborough Design School PhD student Fangjin Zhang and colleagues have been investigating the use of 3D printing within the context of restoration in order to save money. The team is capturing the shape of the original objects using laser or optical scanners then cleaning up the data using reverse engineering techniques. This allows damaged parts of intricate artefacts to be restored in the 3D model before being 3D printed. This has been possible for some time, but Zhang has developed a formalised approach tailored to the restoration of historic artefacts. The teams is working on the ceiling and enclosure of a pavilion in the Emperor Qianlong Garden.
(Source: wired.co.uk)
One hundred years ago this August, Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre in broad daylight with the painting tucked under his smock. The museum didn’t notice until well into the next day, and he wasn’t caught until he outed himself.
Ezra Stoller, Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, NY, 1959
This photograph was used in the USPS commemorative stamps on American architecture.
PRI’s The World reports from the Toilet Museum of New Delhi about an effort to improve sanitation for the 600 million Indians without access to modern toilets.
The Toilet Museum. I must make my travel plans now.
Inside the Hidden Rooms of New York City’s Frick Collection Museum
The Frick has a bowling alley?!?!!!
