Art Wank

Cataloguers of the museum world stand up and be counted

“With his flowing white beard and donnish, almost magical air, Irving Finkel looks every inch the learned scholar.”

• Ed Davey, ‘The 99% of the British Museum not on show’, BBC London, 31 march 2010, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8595000/8595594.stm>

AW: Yep that’s curators for you. Hobbity little wizards every last one of them, but when they work on a cataloguing project that ‘At the current rate […] will take two centuries to complete’, I think that demands our respect. Well done cataloguers everywhere!

And stay tuned for the answer to yesterday’s cataloguing conundrum… what item at our mystery museum belonging to ‘Man Homo sapiens’ and is waiting donation?

Sewellisms # 14: Self-professed ignorance

‘I knew nothing of the Kingdom of Ife in what is now Western Nigeria, until the British Museum’s catalogue of its new exhibition under that title dropped onto my doormat.’

Brian Sewell, ‘The Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa’, 11 March 2010

Read more: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-23814446-heads-of-africa-on-show-at-the-kingdom-of-ife.do

AW: What! I though every first year Courtauld undergraduate had a basic knowledge of eleventh-century West African sculpture! Frankly I was rather taken aback to read Brian Sewell admitting ignorance on any subject. At least until he made his defence in the next sentence; simultaneously showing off his classical education while taking a side swipe at a dead celebrity:

‘it is not quite the same as knowing nothing about Michelangelo, Rembrandt  and Velázquez and the whereabouts of Rome, Amsterdam  and Madrid  (though that appalling level of ignorance now seems the not uncommon consequence of an education system that produced Jade Goody and her ilk)’