Fascinating piece of restoration highlighted by Architecture Week 2004 | June 18 – June 27 Organised and Managed by Arts Council England Long before upstart trader Nick Leeson put the boot into Barings Bank by secretly running up more than $1bn of liabilities, financial difficulties had scuttled one of the key assets of the bank’s…
Author: Michael Shanks
counterfactuals and fakes
– the implications of the question “what if … ?” The ancient historians Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel are two colleagues of mine at Stanford. “Who killed Harry Field?” Ian sees himself as a social scientist of the ancient world – building models of how antiquity worked, models that are general enough to apply beyond…
BorderLine Archaeology
In Sweden, Gothenburg, for Fiona Campbell and Jonna Ulin, defending their joint PhD Dissertation, Borderline Archaeology. Fiona on Labyrinths; Jonna on family archaeology. And performance to deal with both. A remarkable combination And manifested also in a great web site – where you can get the book. This is a site that aims to bridge…
media archaeologies – Iraq
Jack (Mitchell) in my Classics Department here at Stanford came out with a great point about all the imagery of abuse coming out of Iraq. [Link] The digital image has a material force – the image itself, maybe borrowing its authority from the materiality of analogue photography, affects. The image is pre-discursive – that is,…
iconoclasm and the objective art historian – the case of the Bamiyan Buddhas
Nice remark from Jack (Mitchell) about the Taliban’s art criticism: I quite agree with these remarks on the Taliban and their Stinger missiles (the instruments of their art criticism, if I recall correctly). The fact remains, however, that if the Taliban genuinely believed in iconoclasm, and it seems they did believe in it, the one…
Cantor Arts Center – half-century of support
The Cantor Arts Center celebration last Saturday [Link] made it to the San Jose Mercury today – [Link] There are details here of who was involved.