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On Tuesday, June 30, a young woman in what looked like an off-the-shoulder slinky black jumpsuit and tall patent leather heels drifted into a party at the New Museum celebrating "The Generation: Younger Than Jesus," the triennial exhibit featuring 50 international artists under the age of 33 that ended on Sunday, July 5. Other guests thought she was "nice" and "pretty" and "friendly." Then someone pointed out that the peroxide blonde in question, who was also wearing a fringed silver belt and gold hoop earrings, was Meghan McCain, the feisty blogger and daughter of former Republic presidential candidate John McCain....

El Marco's new photo essay exposes how the Denver Art Museum is promoting LSD and radical revolution to today's generation of children. This in-depth study uncovers how a public institution is undermining the city it is supposed to serve. The shocking history of the Psychedelic Movement in San Francisco is juxtaposed with real tragedy in today's recovery community in Denver. http://www.lookingattheleft.com/2009/06/drugs-and-revolution-to-children-at-dam/

I received an e-mail from Sun-ae Evans, a Korean staff member at the Smithsonian who had been my guide during a visit to U.S. libraries and other institutions. "With the Smithsonian extremely busy in preparation for the Lincoln bicentennial, I came to think about Korea. The gun that was used to assassinate president Park Chung-hee, the clothes he wore that day, the bottles of liquor and glasses, and the other miscellaneous items -- are they being well preserved?" What we safeguard now can become important in the way the items related to Lincoln have. Korea is changing very quickly, and...

ATHENS (Reuters Life!) - Greece welcomed home a small fragment of the Parthenon marbles on Wednesday and expressed hope the gesture by the Italian government would prompt Britain to return its own prized collection of Greek sculpture

PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION, Florida (AP) -- Ed Ellis steps across the National Naval Aviation Museum into the aircraft that was Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Chester Nimitz's flying headquarters during World War II. "If this plane could talk," said the 67-year-old retired Navy captain, longing to hear the conversations that happened aboard the vintage PB2Y Coronado. "Nearly every Navy admiral in the Pacific was in here." The Coronado -- the first U.S. plane to land in Tokyo after the war -- is the latest restoration project undertaken by the museum's mostly volunteer staff of hundreds of military retirees. Located at...

Sssr ProductionsChief Vern Jacks, second from left, and his wife, Cora, at the American Museum of Natural History to accept the remains of tribe members. James Estrin/The New York Times“Our Journey Home” took Chief Vern Jacks and his wife, Cora, to the American Museum of Natural History on Monday. A hushed group of people, nearly four dozen strong, slipped into the American Museum of Natural History early Monday, ahead of the crowds. Their cheeks were smeared with rust-colored dye, red and white woven bands encircled their heads, snip... ...these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to...

The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a new permanent exhibit of savagery and barbarism, "The Ancient Americas." The ancient Americans themselves are not portrayed as savage or barbarous. (How surprising. Knock me over with a feather.) The savages and barbarians are the museum's curators. They plunder history, ravage archaeology, do violence to intelligence, and lay waste to wisdom, faith, and common sense. At the Field Museum, the bygone aboriginal inhabitants of our hemisphere are shown to be regular folks, the same as you and me, although usually more naked and always more noble. Ancient Americans have attained...

A unique exhibition of 2,000-year-old paintings called Pompeian Red has opened at the National Museum of Rome.

MILWAUKEE - Milwaukee still loves beer. But arts, culture, museums and festivals are on tap, too. That's the image Milwaukee officials are trying to promote in an effort to attract more tourists. "In a sense we have it all," said Dave Fantle, spokesman for Visit Milwaukee, which markets the area. "We have it all in a neat package. It's a matter of getting our arms around that package and promoting it and letting the world know about all the attributes that are here in Milwaukee." New projects in Milwaukee in recent years have included the Midwest Airlines convention center; the...

National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Garfield lingered on his deathbed for 80 days, attended by doctors who disagreed on his treatment, and by his wife and daughter. Even Alexander Graham Bell tried to help locate the bullet that was lodged in the president. Correction Appended WASHINGTON — Three vertebrae, removed from the body of President James A. Garfield, sit on a stretch of blue satin. A red plastic probe running through them marks the path of his assassin’s bullet, fired on July 2, 1881. The vertebrae form the centerpiece of a new exhibit, commemorating...

ROME, MARCH 23, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Along with spring showers, March has brought a glorious reawakening of Roman art. Two new exhibits opened this week, one at the Vatican Museums and the other in the prestigious Scuderie del Quirinale, the former stables of the papal Quirinal residence, redesigned to hold the city's most important exhibitions. The Vatican Museums, as part of their 500th anniversary celebrations that will last all year, reorganized and reopened their Christian Museum. Complementing the Pio Christian Museum which contains ancient Christian sarcophagi, this collection displays hundreds of small objects found in the catacombs or in Christian sites...

Michael J. Mullen/Scranton Times-Tribune, via Associated PressEverhart Museum of Natural History, Science and Art in Scranton, Pa. Everhart Museum, via Associated Press"Winter in Springs," a drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock. EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Unlike the problem posed in 2003, when a cache of 32 supposed Jackson Pollocks was found in a storage bin on Long Island, this Pollock problem began when a painting attributed to the artist suddenly disappeared. About 2 a.m. on Nov. 18, 2005, "Winter in Springs," a 40-by-32-inch drip painting attributed to Pollock, was stolen from the Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and...

Visiting an art gallery may be the perfect antidote to stress, according to research. Analysis of 28 City high flyers who spent their lunch break viewing art found their stress levels fell by 45% after 40 minutes at the Guildhall art gallery in London.

LONDON, Sept. 11 - An early reference to Alexander of Macedon is the first hint of where the British Museum is heading in its new exhibition, "Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia." After all, to Persians then and Iranians now, there was nothing great about the Alexander who crushed the largest empire the world had yet known. Indeed, his burning of Persepolis in 331 B.C. was considered an act of vandalism. But the show, which runs through Jan. 8, goes further, challenging the version of history that ancient Greece, starting with Herodotus, bequeathed to the West. Put simply, in...

The wife and I are heading down to Memphis, TN for a short trip. What else is there to do besides tour Graceland? I heard there was a cool shopping district not far from Graceland. Where is the best barbecue in town and where is the best place to find a safe economical motel that is close by to attractions? Also heading on to Baton Rouge, LA. Where is a decent but economical place to stay in that town? A pool would be a plus. Is everything off of I-10 in BR? I appreciate all your help and responses. TIA....

A government report has found that many of the institution’s buildings have fallen into disrepairWASHINGTON, DC. A report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the Smithsonian Institution requires urgent funding if it is to maintain its 660 buildings and care for the millions of objects, documents, and photographs in its collections over the next decade. The study describes “a broad decline” in the Smithsonian’s aging empire of 18 museums, 10 science centres and zoos, and other facilities, many of which have suffered “structural deterioration” and “chronic leaks” so severe that they have limited access to their...

Microprobe makeover for museum's mummy Selina Mitchell JUNE 28, 2005 THE CSIRO has teamed up with the National Gallery of Victoria to reconstruct and conserve the last resting place of a teenage Egyptian priestess who died around 700BC. The coffin lid, one of the first major Egyptian antiquities to arrive in Australia, is in a fragile state. About 60 per cent of the wood, and even more of its painted surface, are lost, but the original bright colours on the remaining pieces survive under layers of dirt – gallery officials think. "It's good that it's in many pieces, because unlike...

MOSCOW, May 16 - A week ago, on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Vladimir V. Putin appeared together in Red Square in a symbolic nod to the historical reconciliation between Germany and Russia. But a few blocks away, a museum exhibition showed how the war's dark legacies continue to divide the two countries. Shortly before Victory Day, as it is known here, the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts put on display 552 ancient works of art, including Greek bronzes, vases and amphorae, Etruscan figures, fragments of Roman wall paintings...

PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 14 -- One of the nation's richest troves of impressionist and post-impressionist art is moving to downtown Philadelphia now that its trustees have won court permission to leave their hard-to-visit suburban gallery, a legacy of the collection's eccentric founder. Trustees of the Barnes Foundation had argued for two years that they should be allowed to move the collection of Renoirs, Cezannes, Matisses and Picassos because decades of limited attendance and high costs in Lower Merion Township have nearly bankrupted the foundation

The Benevento Missal is to be returned to Italy, as a result of a claim submitted following an investigation by The Art Newspaper. On 23 March the UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel recommended that the British Library should restitute the 12th century manuscript to Benevento cathedral. This will be the first time that a UK national institution has returned an artwork or manuscript looted during the Nazi era. A change in the law will be required, since the British Library is legally barred from deaccessioning the manuscript. The Art Newspaper heard rumours about the questionable status of the Benevento Missal in...

Many a visitor to New York's Museum of Modern Art has probably thought, "I could do that," but a graffiti artist has gone one step further. A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" smuggled in his own picture of a soup can and hung it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed. The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day. The largest piece, which he smuggled into the Brooklyn Museum, was an oil painting, 61centimetres...

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 5 - Even as the presidential campaign remains steeped in a debate about John Kerry's military service in Vietnam, another highly charged dispute over the Vietnam War has been resolved - albeit imperfectly - between Vietnamese-Americans and a prominent museum here. An exhibit, "What's Going On? California in the Era of Vietnam," opened late last month at the Oakland Museum of California and is scheduled to run through February before traveling to Los Angeles and Chicago. Five years in the making, it tells the wartime story of California during the 1960's and 70's, ripping at wounds among...

What’s THE biggest media myth to come out of the Iraq? War and its messy aftermath? Forget Maureen Dowd’s attempt to trash George W. Bush by altering the president’s words. That kind of "journalism" has become just standard operating procedure at the New York Times. (" All the News Fit to Distort") No, for sheer, long-lasting stamina, we nominate the urban legend about the pillaging of Baghdad’s archaeological museum. Remember how it was supposed to have been emptied by looters? It was THE RAPE OF CIVILIZATION! The anguished comments from distinguished archaeologists sounded more like tabloid headlines. The Death of...

PARIS For almost half a century, Europe overlooked the art treasures that were looted from Jewish homes by the Nazis and were never returned. Then, as mid-20th-century European history resurfaced in the 1990s, the political climate changed. Suddenly, missing art became a moral issue and red-faced governments, museums and auction houses hurriedly promised to make amends. In the glare of publicity, no one wanted to be seen profiting from the Holocaust. Yet, despite all the headlines, relatively little of this looted art has so far been restituted. True, it represents only a small proportion of what the Nazis stole from...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - It was a great legend while it lasted, but DNA testing has finally ended a century-old story of the Hawaiian arrow carved from the bone of British explorer Captain James Cook who died in the Sandwich Islands in 1779. "There is no Cook in the Australian Museum," museum collection manager Jude Philp said on Thursday in announcing the DNA evidence that the arrow was not made from Cook's bone. But that will not stop the museum from continuing to display the arrow in its exhibition, "Uncovered: Treasures of the Australian Museum," which does include a feather cape...

It came from outer space and we don't care, say museums Giles Tremlett in Madrid Saturday January 24, 2004 The Guardian (UK) A home was yesterday being sought for two fragments of rock from outer space which fell to earth in Spain two weeks ago and which museums there have turned down. The meteor fragments were found by a Spanish journalist, Abel Tarilonte, after a flaming ball of rock was seen shooting across the skies of northern and central Spain. Villagers in the mountains of northern Spain reported hearing and feeling explosions after the bright white fireball passed overhead on...

<p>Slavery is one of the thorniest of issues -- and rightly so. Even today, with the War between the States seemingly part of ancient history, many black Americans face insurmountable challenges when they try to trace their family history. It is difficult to move forward when you do not know where you have been. Our troubled school system doesn't help, since it even fails to teach the basic reading and writing skills that children need to advance into high school. Suffice it to say, while public schools are doing a shameful job, the D.C. Lottery is doing its part to impart American history.</p>

CAMP THUNDER, Iraq — Sgt. Kurt Smith is spending his time in Iraq as a full-time medic and part-time historian. Many of the weapons that his unit, the 4th Armored Division’s 3rd Battalion, 16th Field Artillery Regiment, have confiscated belong in museums rather than their arms room, he said. There are two 1917 Webley revolvers, World War I-era British Enfield rifles, World War II-era German Mauser rifles, Russian PPKs and British submachine guns. “I’m a weapons enthusiast,” said Smith. “My dad was a weapons collector and he passed on some weapons to me and my brother.” For the past few...

Egypt demands return of ancient Rosetta StoneJuly 21 2003Egypt is demanding that the 2000-year-old Rosetta Stone be returned to Cairo and has threatened to pursue its claim "aggressively" if the British Museum does not agree to give it back. The stone, which became the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, was found by Napoleon's army in 1799 in the Nile delta, but has been in Britain for 200 years. "If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our Egyptian identity," said...

Egypt demands return of the Rosetta Stone By Charlotte Edwardes and Catherine Milner (Filed: 20/07/2003) Egypt is demanding that the Rosetta Stone, a 2,000-year-old relic and one of the British Museum's most important exhibits, should be returned to Cairo. The stone, which became the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, was found by Napoleon's army in 1799 in the Nile delta, but has been in Britain for the past 200 years. It forms the centrepiece of the British Museum's Egyptology collection and is seen by millions of visitors each year. Now, in an echo of the campaign by Athens for...

<p>The National Endowment for the Humanities will be doling out $500,000 in grants to restore Iraq's cultural heritage, the federal agency announced yesterday.</p> <p>Beginning Aug. 1, the agency will receive proposals for projects that can last for up to two years. Known as "Recovering Iraq's Past," the initiative is geared toward shoring up collections in Iraq's archives, libraries and museums. Projects may start as soon as Jan. 1.</p>

Looters are systematically stripping many of Iraq's 10,000 archaeological sites and should be shot on sight by coalition forces, an expert said yesterday. Gangs of up to 400 people are stealing antiquities for the international market and some sites have been largely destroyed, said Elizabeth Stone, an American archaeology professor. "I would like to see helicopters flying over there shooting bullets so that people know there is a real price to looting this stuff," said Prof Stone, of Stony Brook University, New York. "You have got to kill some people to stop this." Prof Stone, who has been at the...

In the old times there were two suns above the Earth. Unfortunately one got broken to pieces; the pieces dropped into the ocean that now casts bits of "the solar stone" ashore. People call these pieces amber. It is a nice legend about amber; it slightly reminds of the story of creation, loss and restoration of the famous amber chamber in Tsarskoye Selo. One woman from the Russian city of Rostov was one of the first people who believed that the amber chamber could be restored. What is more, she made first considerable contribution into the reconstruction process. In 1976,...

Egypt to Put Ancient Mummified Pets on Show CAIRO (Reuters) - Ancient Egyptians loved their pets so much they even wanted to take them into the after life. Mummified cats, dogs, monkeys and even crocodiles -- lovingly preserved in the same way as the pharaohs -- will be on display later this month in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told Reuters Television that ancient Egyptians were not only pet lovers who wanted to preserve animals for life after death, but also held some animal forms as sacred. "The ancient Egyptians worshipped the god Thoth, the...

Ever wanted to know what happened to that Stealth Fighter that was shot down over Serbia in 1999? Well, here ya go... http://airliners.net/open.file?id=378442

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE-- The scene was like a midnight ceremony on the tarmac of some distant military air base: Surrounded by floodlit fighter jets, 16 Air Force crewmembers clad in desert camouflage stood on a temporary stage and presented symbols of war to Air Force officials. In fact, the ceremony took place Tuesday afternoon inside the new addition of the Air Force Museum. Painted flat black, the high, hangar-like ceiling of the Kettering Cold War Gallery gave a sense of infinite space above suspended spotlights that illuminated museum aircraft. Under one pool of light was the stage, with a...

One of the highlights of the Cape Fear Museum's exhibit, "What So Proudly We Hailed," is the Second National Confederate Flag, mostly white with a rebel battle flag in reversed colors stitched into the canton, or field. The flag was made by Wilmington women and given to Col. William Lamb, commander of Fort Fisher, after his men rebuffed a Union attack on the fort around Christmas 1864. It was waving over Fort Fisher on Jan. 15, 1865, when the Yankees made their final, decisive assault on the fort, combining a "shock and awe" naval bombardment &#8211; the largest ever at...

The Real Museum LootersBy Keith LockitchAynRand.org | May 13, 2003 Initial reports of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum sparked a frenzy of outrage. Denied their desert quagmire, their civilian massacres, their oil-fire eco-disaster, and their inflamed "Arab street," leftists all but leaped at the opportunity to denounce our armed forces—with some even urging that our soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes for their alleged failure to prevent the looting.It turns out, though, that our troops were not standing "idly by" but were being fired at from the museum complex. And the number of missing artifacts—initially assumed to be...

The Non-Pillage of BaghdadBy Wall Street Journal EditorialThe Wall Street Journal | May 7, 2003 "It is very common for the first information following a crisis to be wrong, and when I say wrong, I mean wrong."So spoke Ronald Noble, the Secretary General of Interpol, at a conference yesterday in Lyon, France, devoted to the recovery of stolen Iraqi artifacts. The context for Mr. Noble's remarks is the incredible reduction in the estimate of the number of artworks lost in the ransacking of Baghdad's National Museum.The claims have gone from 170,000 items first reported to the 30 to 40 that...

WASHINGTON, May 6 — President Bush appointed a new civilian administrator for Iraq today, settling a sharp disagreement between the State and Defense Departments over how best to manage that country during its recovery and reconstruction. The new administrator, L. Paul Bremer, who served as an ambassador at large for counterterrorism in the Reagan administration, will outrank Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who has been in charge of postwar administration since the government of Saddam Hussein was ousted by American-led military forces last month. The Pentagon had hoped to retain control of the postwar effort, so the decision...

<p>BAGHDAD - The vast majority of the Iraqi trove of antiquities feared stolen or broken have been found inside the National Museum in Baghdad, according to American investigators who compiled an inventory over the weekend of the ransacked galleries.</p> <p>A total of 38 antiquities, not tens of thousands, are now believed to be missing. Among them is a single display of Babylonian cuneiform tablets that accounts for nine missing items.</p> <p>The single most valuable missing piece is the Vase of Warka, a white limestone bowl dating from 3000 B.C.</p>

--snip-- Slowly but surely, military officers and U.S. Customs agents are beginning to account for the disparate pieces of a vast museum collection from a land rich in history and artifacts thousands of years old. And what they have discovered is that far fewer pieces were looted from the museum's collection than initial reports indicated. --snip-- "Some of the original reports indicated close to 170,000 items were either stolen or destroyed," said Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who heads the investigation. "What we're finding is that the number is significantly smaller, by a factor of at least 100.

MISSING ANTIQUITIES Loss Estimates Are Cut on Iraqi Artifacts, but Questions Remain By ALAN RIDING BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 30 — Even though many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the National Museum of Iraq during the chaotic fall of Baghdad last month, museum officials and American investigators now say the losses seem to be less severe than originally thought. Col. Matthew F. Bogdanos, a Marine reservist who is investigating the looting and is stationed at the museum, said museum officials had given him a list of 29 artifacts that were definitely missing. But since then, 4 items — ivory objects from...

PORTSMOUTH, Va. -- An underwater survey found what might be remnants of the Confederate ironclad warship Virginia, the former USS Merrimack that fought the Union's ironclad Monitor in the 1862 battle that redefined naval warfare. "It would be a stroke of incredible luck to discover it after all these years," said Dick Hoffeditz, curator of the Virginia War Museum in Newport News. The underwater survey, for the proposed construction of a marine terminal on the Elizabeth River, describes two shipwrecks in the area and says there is "a distinct possibility" that they might be parts of the Virginia and of...

U.S. Museum to Return Ramses I Mummy to Egypt Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News April 30, 2003 A 3,000-year-old mummy that many scholars believe is ancient Egypt's King Ramses I is the star attraction of an exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta that will run from April 26 to September 14. How the mummy came to reside in North America for 140 years, and wound up in Atlanta, is a tale that includes the collapse of law and order in ancient Egypt, grave robbers, stolen antiquities, a two-headed calf and a five-legged pig, the wonders of...

Douglas Anthony Cooper of Montreal chides me for a throwaway line in last week's column about the antiwar crowd's sudden interest in property crime: "Steal the photocopier from Baghdad's Ministry of Genital Clamping and they're pining for the smack of firm government." "Some matters reside beyond the domain of comedy," writes Cooper. "The rape of the National Museum of Iraq and the torching of the National Library will be lamented by historians for centuries." He concludes, "A man of Steyn's sensibilities beneath the sneer I detect a partisan of Western civilization ought to find this an occasion of immense sorrow."...

Tuesday, April 22, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST] We Americans must face two realities since Operation Iraqi Freedom has proved so successful. Reality #1: The world's leftists and America-haters (many of them fellow Americans) want to see us fail in Iraq. Reality #2: They have plenty of time to make sure we fail or at least give the mentally challenged worldwide the impression that we did. They will conduct a campaign against America until long after an Iraqi government takes over and Iraqi oil is lubricating the Iraqi and world economies. The campaign began with the fall of Baghdad. The hullabaloo...

The blue Kia minivan rolled through the guarded gates of the National Museum of Antiquities early this afternoon, loaded with a precious cargo of metals and minerals: a bronze relief from the 4th century B.C. swathed in yellow foam padding, antique farm implements, an elaborately engraved marble slab wrapped in plastic, a decapitated statue of an Assyrian king. Also inside the van was Namir Ibrahim Jamil, a 33-year-old Iraqi pianist who said that 11 days ago he watched in horror as looters ransacked the museum, hauling away as much of Iraq's tangible legacy as they could carry. He said he...

If Iraq's National Museum had not been looted, the conspiracy theorists - the antiwar, anti-Bush commentators and protestors - would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened. Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet from loony to loony. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce, who wouldn't know a 5,000 year-old Warka Vase from a Mexican flower pot from Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, he said to himself.) Besides, his cronies who are rich...

<p>If thieves hadn't looted Iraq's National Museum, the conspiracy theorists — the anti-war, anti-Bush pundits and protesters — would have had to invent the story. Instead, they merely invented the story of how it happened.</p> <p>Here are some of the interpretations racing across the Internet, from looney to loonier. George W. Bush is a cultural dunce who wouldn't know a 5,000-year-old Warka vase from a Mexican flower pot at Wal-Mart. He didn't care about the artifacts. (It's not like they're Rembrandts or Leonardos or even Elvises on velvet, George W. said to himself.) Besides, his cronies, who are rich collectors, now get a chance to buy the real stuff on the open black market: They can bid on that cuneiform accounting table (1980 B.C.) when it turns up for auction at Christie's. The Web site of the World Socialists describes "the politics of plunder" as a preface to stealing the oil wells.</p>