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;…
heritage
automotive connoisseurship
Palo Alto Concours d’Elegance – . Taking a tour with Jon Summers. What are the values and principles that govern the collection of cars? Just what are the values applied to these extraordinary artifacts? Age, elegance, finish, rarity, historical significance, market value … These are questions of automotive connoisseurship.
Louwman Museum – a cathedral of automobilia
Visited the Louwman collection of automobilia today with Riemer Knoop – [Link] One of the oldest and most spectacular in the world. Housed in a remarkable new building (architect – Michael Graves) in Den Haag, Netherlands.
Old Amsterdam – Café Scheltema
The way things used to be? Talking heritage with Rob van der Laase [Link] – the way the past is cleaned up, filtered, extraneous matter removed – that we might more appreciate a clear narrative – that this did indeed happen here. Here – a remarkable untouched remnant of a meeting place, famously associated with…
heritage/design – theatre/archaeology
I am in Amsterdam delivering the Reinwardt Memorial Lecture at the Reinwardt Academy for Cultural Heritage in the Amsterdam School of the Arts [Link] [Link] This annual event commemorates the birthday of Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (3 June 1773 – 6 March 1854), after whom the Reinwardt Academy is named. The Academy is the foremost…
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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