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Posts tagged museum
Man Homo sapiens sapiens a) Pending, cf. Letter of Donation.
The answer to our cataloguing quiz, what object is being described?, is… a human penis. I bet the Icelandic Phallologigal Museum can’t wait to get its hands on that specimen.
Here at Art Wank we love a bit of cataloguing. For a fun quiz can you guess?
(i) which museum this catalogue entry could have come from?
and
(ii) what the object is?
Man Homo sapiens sapiens a) Pending, cf. Letter of Donation.
The New York Post - in an article called ‘“Jihad” jitters at Met - does its darnedest to make a story out of the fact that the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY) has rehung its Islamic Collection without including any of its images of the Prophet Mohammed.
‘Critics say the Met has a history of dodging criticism and likely wants to escape the kind of outcry that Danish cartoons of Mohammed caused in 2006.’
ISABEL VINCENT, ‘“Jihad” jitters at Met’, New York Post, 10 January 2010
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/jihad_jitters_at_met_76yj3VNUy4hcRAnhOcPCHP
Or it could be that… ‘The Met currently has about 60 items from its 60,000-piece Islamic collection on temporary display in a corner of its vast second-floor Great Hall while larger galleries are renovated. But its three ancient renderings of Mohammed are not among them.’ - Yes, that the Met is only able to show 1000th of its collection at one time, and images of Mohammed are not only rare in their collection, but rare in Islamic art.
‘Three years ago, the Met changed its “Primitive Art Galleries” to the “Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas” for the sake of political correctness, said author Michael Gross, author of “Rogues’ Gallery,” a book about the Met.’
That’s hardly ‘political correctness gone mad’, is it? More like a overdue redefinition of three whole continents worth of art. The term primitive is now not only considered racist, (http://www.survivalinternational.org/stampitout), but misleading and highly reductive when applied so broadly. Rather than political correctness, the renaming of the galleries was clearly a decision based on a greater understanding of non-western art.
It is interesting to see that the comments thread beneath this article has been hijacked by racists, and that there has been a woeful lack of moderation; shocking as you need to sign in to leave a comment.
