2015年12月10日星期四

museum, Museology, milieu, artifacts, kowtowing, cajoling

Mr. Li’s struggle to open his Songtangzhai Museum is a tortured tale that involved five years of kowtowing, cajoling and a “gift” of 148 prized items to the Culture Ministry. The $4.50 entrance fee to his museum, which occupies an 18th-century house, does not cover the cost of operations, so Mr. Li subsidizes it from his own pocket. He says he has never sold any artifacts.

Review

"This book is extraordinary in revealing not only so much about Matisse that was previously unknown and unexpected, but also so much of real importance to an understanding of him and his art . . . Truly indispensable for anyone interested in Matisse, or in the milieu in which he lived and worked, or in the forces that shaped the art of this century--with a human dimension that is vividly drawn, utrterly compelling, and profoundly moving."
--John Elderfield, curator of the 1992 Matisse retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

In a chapter on art collectors, Kimmelman describes his encounter with Hugh Francis Hicks, a dentist who collected light bulbs. Dr. Hicks amassed 75,000 of them and created the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting in the basement of his office building in Baltimore. He was so excited about his collection that when a visitor turned up, he sometimes abandoned patients in the dental chair midway through an operation.

Dialogue 25.01.2008 05:30
The Former Concentration Camp of Auschwitz is now a Museum

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Nothing can be compared to the horrors of Auschwitz

January 27th is the United Nations annual day of Holocaust remembrance
Ón January 27th,the United Nations annual day of Holocaust remembrance, people and institutions around the world commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland by the Red Army in 1945. In Germany this year, attention is focused on a touring exhibition which opened in Berlin on Wednesday. On display are railway cattle-trucks that transported Jews and other victims of the Nazis to concentration camps. The show combines items already shown at the German Railways' Museum with documents collected by Beate Klarsfeld, a Franco-German journalist. A few months earlier, the "Train of Memory" received equal attention. It is a vintage steam locomotive pulling two train cars containing pictures of child Holocaust victims. The train has been touring Germany and will reach Auschwitz on May 8. But how is history being kept alive in Auschwitz itself?
(Report: Frank Kempe/

西方藝術史上最特別之一人Giuseppe Arcimboldo(Born in Milan in 1536)之展覽 (2007 巴黎)

"Vertumnus"(portrait of Rudolph II), ca. 1590. Global exploration and advances in fields like optics and engineering stirred Rudolf, like other enlightened patrons, to wish to possess whatever was the rarest, the finest, the strangest, the most inexplicable art and artifacts. From such cabinets of curiosities — attempts to catalog and rationalize the irrational — evolved, one day, the modern museum. This was Arcimboldo’s milieu and motivation.

Museology, or museum studies (also known in older sources as museography^[1]), is the study of museums, museum curation, and how museums developed into their institutional role in education through social and political forces.^[2]