I have joined the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam as part of a new exhibition program. This extraordinary museum [Link] holds the largest collection of contemporary art in the Netherlands. Experiments in temporary and often provocative exhibitions, rather than permanent displays of the collection, are the museum’s specialty, and it runs over twenty a…
cultural politics
the culture of the Academy – lessons from design thinking
Across on archaeology.org Chris (Witmore) has taken issue with a comment Tim Ingold has made about the notion of a symmetrical archaeology.[Link] Symmetrical Archaeology? Like many others, Archaeologists regularly do all they can to separate what they do from what they study, their work in the present from the past, past artifacts from the stories…
photowork >> performed photography
As a skeptical young archaeologist back in the early 1980s I was fascinated by the connections between archaeology and photography, in archaeology’s project of documenting the remains of the past. Skeptical – I thought, and still do, that archaeology’s long links with the identity politics of nationalism and colonialism and its role in the growing…
Olympics opening – (in)tangible heritage
London – the opening of the 30th Olympiad A bucolic pastoral green and pleasant land succumbing to dark satanic mills, in William Blake’s vision, homage also to Tolkein’s pitting of Hobbiton against Isengard’s tower; Shakespeare’s Tempest declaimed by Brunel on the slopes of a druidic oak-toppped Glastonbury Tor; dreams of Peter Pan and Mary Poppins;…
time-space distanciation – past and present
We were out last night with friends. The water at the local restaurant in Palo Alto – imported from Wales, bottled in the squire’s house, Llanllyr, in the village of Talsarn, where we once lived (next to the house where Dylan Thomas wrote “Under Milk Wood”), before we moved to California.
against cultural property – heritage as design – and wellbeing
My argument [Link] that heritage is a matter of creativity and design – work done with, typically, remains of the past (tangible and intangible) – involves an argument that heritage should not be conceived as cultural property. I made this point, though rather weakly, in my entry on cultural property for The Oxford Companion to…
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