Looking Around

Okay, we all agree that museums need to safeguard their work. (Obvious example — the Munch Museum in Oslo wasn’t doing enough in that line when The Scream was stolen in 2004. Since getting it back — damaged — they’ve bolted it to a wall and installed security gates.) But I was a little surprised to learn last weekend from the …

Because 1968 was such a tumultuous moment there are a lot of 40th anniversaries this year. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the May uprisings in France, the street battles at the Democratic …

It’s a truism of the museum world that directors who have overseen a major expansion at their museum tend to step down once that work is done. Sadly that wasn’t true for Anne d’Harnoncourt, who died on Sunday before see could see to completion all the changes she set in motion at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

But yesterday

A friend passed this over to me. Open it.

Three years ago I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art getting an early look at the Dali retrospective that would be one their big shows that year. It was an exhibition that would try to make the case that Dali’s later work was more important than we usually think it is. The show had …

Last week I revisited the sacred site of the Woodstock festival, 39 years after I made my way there as a 17-year-old hippie would-be. Then I wrote about it in this week’s magazine.

Again. Back tomorrow.

I spent a good part of Tuesday night looking at a website of Polaroids taken by Jamie Livingston, a film maker and musician who shot one a day from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997, almost 6700 altogether. Sometimes he may have had a friend take the picture, because he appears …

Over the weekend I read The Terra Cotta Army by John Man, a British travel writer and historian. It’s about the thousands of life size clay soldiers and other figures prepared for the tomb of China’s First Emperor in the 3rd century B.C. Last year China shipped out about 20 …

I’m busy today finishing up a piece for the magazine, so I won’t have much to say. But a bit of news caught my eye this morning. Back in March I posted about plans to build a big merchandise warehouse not far from Stonehenge, which will mean a major increase in traffic along the nearby roads. Now it …

It’s been almost two years since police recovered The Scream and Madonna, the Edvard Munchs that were stolen in 2004 from the Munch Museum in Oslo. We’ve known for a while that both paintings were damaged during the theft and after. Tomorrow they go on display again at the museum, and the …

On Tuesday I finally got a look inside one of the most contested buildings of the last half century. I’ve written a few times about the threat of demolition faced by Paul Rudolph houses, schools and offices around the country. At Yale, where …

Today the National Trust for Historic Preservation will issue its annual list of 11 sites around the U.S. that it considers to be the ones most threatened by development, neglect or whatever other forces devour the past. Their hope is that by calling attention to places in jeopardy they can mobilize people to protect them. Which means: …