Robert-Goldwater-Library

Apocalypto: the reviews are still coming in

Photo source

Short takes in this month's Anthropology News (September 2007):

Apocalypto in Cobá
Robey Callahan
The local views of the Hollywood presentation of the Maya may not make comfortable reading, but the fact remains that the only outsiders who get the thumbs up in Cobá are anthropologists and Mel Gibson. 

Gibson's Apocalypto as an Act Against the Maya
Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli
Mel Gibson' s film goes to great strides to appear accurate, and in so doing endangers recent advances the Maya have made to overcome some of the still-felt consequences of conquest and colonization.

Unfortunately these articles are not (yet) available on the the Web.

• When first we heard about it (our blog post).
  

         

Too Cool for Their Shush-shirts

EAT, DRINK, BE LITERARY From left, Jessica Pigza, Maria Falgoust, Jeff Buckley and Sarah Murphy at a social event for librarians where the author Robert Sullivan, far right, spoke. photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

via NYTimes:

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers
By KARA JESELLA
Published: July 8, 2007
ON a Sunday night last month at Daddy’s, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, more than a dozen people in their 20s and 30s gathered at a professional soiree, drinking frozen margaritas and nibbling store-bought cookies. With their thrift-store inspired clothes and abundant tattoos, they looked as if they could be filmmakers, Web designers, coffee shop purveyors or artists.

SOCIAL BOOKWORMS Maria Falgoust helped start Desk Set to meet like-minded librarians. Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

“Maria Falgoust, 31, is also a founder of Desk Set, which took its name from the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy. A student who works part time at the library at Saint Ann’s School, she was inspired to become a librarian by a friend, a public librarian who works with teenagers and goes to rock shows regularly.

Since matriculating to Palmer, Ms. Falgoust has met plenty of other like-minded librarians at places such as Brooklyn Label, a restaurant, and at Punk Rope, an exercise class. “They’re everywhere you go,” she said.”

When talk turned to a dance party the group had recently given at a nearby restaurant, their profession became clearer.

“Did you try the special drinks?” Sarah Gentile, 29, asked Jennifer Yao, 31, referring to the colorfully named cocktails.

“I got the Joy of Sex,” Ms. Yao replied. “I thought for sure it was French Women Don’t Get Fat.”

Ms. Yao could be forgiven for being confused: the drink was numbered and the guests had to guess the name. “613.96 C,” said Ms. Yao, cryptically, then apologized: “Sorry if I talk in Dewey.”

That would be the Dewey Decimal System. The groups’ members were librarians. Or, in some cases, guybrarians.

“He hates being called that,” said Sarah Murphy, one of the evening’s organizers and a founder of the Desk Set, a social group for librarians and library students.

Ms. Murphy was speaking of Jeff Buckley, a reference librarian at a law firm, who had a tattoo of the logo from the Federal Depository Library Program peeking out of his black T-shirt sleeve.

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is “looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing.”

When the cult film “Party Girl” appeared in 1995, with Parker Posey as a night life impresario who finds happiness in the stacks, the idea that a librarian could be cool was a joke.

Now, there is a public librarian who writes dispatches for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a favored magazine of the young literati. “Unshelved,” a comic about librarians — yes, there is a comic about librarians — features a hipster librarian character. And, in real life, there are an increasing number of librarians who are notable not just for their pink-streaked hair but also for their passion for pop culture, activism and technology.

“We’re not the typical librarians anymore,” said Rick Block, an adjunct professor at the Long Island University Palmer School and at the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, both graduate schools for librarians, in New York City.

“When I was in library school in the early ’80s, the students weren’t as interesting,” Mr. Block said. 

Since then, however, library organizations have been trying to recruit a more diverse group of students and to mentor younger members of the profession.

“I think we’re getting more progressive and hipper,” said Carrie Ansell, a 28-year-old law librarian in Washington.

In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.

Michele Besant, the librarian at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Association of Library and Information Science statistics show a steady increase in library information science enrollments over the last 10 years. Further, at hers and other schools there is a trend for students to be entering masters programs at a younger age.

The myth prevails that librarians are becoming obsolete. “There’s Google, no one needs us,” Ms. Gentile said, mockingly, over a drink at Daddy’s.

Still, these are high-tech times. Why are people getting into this profession when libraries seem as retro as the granny glasses so many of the members of the Desk Set wear?

“Because it’s cool,” said Ms. Gentile, who works at the Brooklyn Museum.

read on...

"Primitivism" Revisited

via NYTimes, 1/19/07:

PRIMITIVISM REVISITED
After the End of an Idea
Sean Kelly
528 West 29th Street, Chelsea
Through Jan. 27

In 1984 “'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art” at the Museum of Modern Art caused a hullabaloo, not because the show was good, but because it was perceived to be so wrong. In tracing the relationships between Western Modernism and the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the curators took a universalist approach. They gave short shrift to context and cultural meaning and assigned non-Western art a supporting role in the story of Western Modernism.

By the early 1980s this perspective was badly out of date. Multiculturalist thinking was redefining the most basic terms: “art,” “African, “Modernism,” “universal.” Today these terms and ideas continue to be tested, revised and expanded. “Primitivism Revisited” gives some sense of those developments.

Organized by 18 graduate students from a class taught by Susan Vogel, professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University, and coordinated by Olivia Powell and Dan Leers, the show breaks down into several thematic sections, with two students in charge of each. Mixing contemporary art by Western and African-born artists with examples of — these labels are up for grabs — traditional and tourist art, the show asks telling questions about authenticity, spiritual utility and cross-cultural perception.

If the themes aren’t new, a certain 21st-century way of approaching them, in a balanced back-and-forth between Western and non-Western cultures, feels fresh. Not coincidentally, all the art looks invigorated and somehow added-to.

A vampy Elizabeth Peyton male beauty matched with a carved Baule spirit spouse suggest different, but not necessarily polar, embodiments of desire. Seeing a documentary video of a traditional masquerade in Burkina Faso next to a film of a masked performance organized by the artist Pedro Lasch in Jackson Heights, Queens, is a reminder that Africa had performance art, conceptual art, installation art, body art and sound art long before the modern West cooked up such labels.

HOLLAND COTTER

The Maya Post-Apocalypto

Mad Mel and the Maya by Earl Shorris
December 18, 2006

To grasp what a racist act Gibson has committed in the making of his new film [Apocalypto], it is necessary to understand the world of the Maya as it exists today. Perhaps realizing what has been done to the Maya in the film, Gibson has been seeking allies among Latinos and American Indians. He even went so far as to tell Time magazine, "The fear mongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys."

Pissed-off Maori: Imitation, inspiration or appropriation?

via NZEdge:

Imitation, inspiration or appropriation?
2006 has seen a rash of advertising and design taking inspiration - with varying degrees of offensiveness - from Maori art and culture. An Italian ad for the Fiat Idea showing a group of black garbed women performing a mock haka has gone to air despite warnings of cultural insensitivity from NZ diplomats. According to Brad Tattersfield of NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, "we advised the advertising company that the use of Ka Mate in this way was culturally insensitive and inappropriate. MFAT advised the advertisers to either use a Maori group or a haka composed for women. However, the advertising company indicated they were proceeding despite this advice." In the US, an American developer's proposal to build a Maori-themed apartment complex in Texas has divided Maori opinion. While activist Ken Mair calls the plan "cultural theft and possibly theft of intellectual property" author Alan Duff thinks Maori have bigger problems to worry about: "Greece is not up in arms because Las Vegas did Ancient Greece themes in their casinos. Why are we so precious about things that don't count?" Finally, cult US fashion brand Paul Frank has released a T-shirt print titled 'Warrior Julius,' depicting its distinctive monkey mascot with a full facial moko.
(4 July 2006)

via The Art Newspaper:

New Zealand Maoris furious over plans for a themed apartment complex in Texas
By Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted 19 October 2006

NEW YORK. A proposed Maori-themed apartment complex outside Dallas recently served as a platform for the New Zealand natives to proclaim their pride. In June, after California-based Legacy Partners announced plans to build a residential complex featuring Maori themes and folk art in suburban Plano, the company received dozens of emails charging the company with "cultural theft." Complaints centered on the name of the complex, "Kiora Park," taken from the Maori expression of welcome. The problem was that the phrase is properly transliterated as "Kia Ora." "How many more mistakes will there be?" Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia asked. "We're all very proud of the culture and more than willing to share it with people who come here, but to have it transplanted into Dallas, that sounds a bit incredible," she said.

No harm was meant, explains Richard Brownjohn, a vice president in Legacy's Dallas office. "Our marketing people thought it had an unusual ring but was something people would easily pronounce. It was spelled as one word at first because Americans might butcher the spelling and we wanted it pronounced right. We didn’t think it would get Maoris upset," he says. The name was quickly changed to "Kia Ora Park".

Heart of Darkness... or Apocalypse Now?

Totemic figures from Oceania on display at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, a museum devoted entirely to non-Western art.

..."The horror, the horror" ? New York Times arts writer Michael Kimmelman reams the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris:

A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: July 2, 2006

[...] The most ambitious museum to open in Paris in 20 years, dedicated to non-European cultures, Quai Branly provoked a ruckus from the instant President Jacques Chirac came up with the idea for it more than a decade ago. It was his monument to French multiculturalism and, perhaps, to himself.

Two beloved Paris institutions had to be dismantled, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de l'Homme, France's sublime natural history museum. Anthropologists, not to mention more than a few people who loved going to those museums, were furious. The familiar aesthetics-versus-ethnology question came up: Will religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern, Western sense, be showcased like baubles, with no context?

Given the current political climate, Quai Branly's eventual opening, after years of delay, seemed almost as if it had been scientifically calculated to ignite the maximum debate.

I couldn't tell whether Mr. Martin was being helpful or if he actually enjoyed the fuss. What did he think of his museum? I asked. He thought it was a "neutral environment" with "no aesthetic or philosophical line." I thought he was kidding.

He wasn't. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.

The dismay was obvious when I met museum directors, curators, anthropologists and art historians at a conference in Quai Branly, just before the museum's opening. For about an hour everyone on a panel talked about the need for better, more flexible museums, which seemed to me an obvious euphemism for the problem here, which nobody mentioned — until a scholar, Christian Feest, smiled, raised his eyebrows and tilted his head slightly.

He couldn't help, he said, pointing out the elephant in the room: How would Quai Branly overcome the obstacle of its own design? That shifted the atmosphere, as if tension had been released, and during the break I intercepted several African and American curators and a French art historian who all shook their heads and confided, as if revealing a private embarrassment, that Quai Branly was a missed opportunity and an inexplicable enterprise. An Australian architecture critic then sidled over and nodded toward Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, who had been mobbed the day before at the press opening. Now he was standing alone. Everyone was passing him by on the way to hors d'oeuvres. [read on...]

Google Book Search and A View From Europe

via The University of Chicago Press website [thanks Ross!]:

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge : A View from Europe
by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Ian Wilson (Foreword), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator)
Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0226395774

The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing.

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google's Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the foundation for a universal library.

As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google's digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism.

For those who are interested in this issue, a video stream of an argument offered by Lawrence Lessig [or else here] in favor of the Google project; or else read his article:

Google's Tough Call
By Lawrence Lessig (Wired Magazine Issue 13:11, Nov 2005)

And more info here:
Another Google Book Search Commentary Roundup
By Andrew Raff (IPTA Blog, Dec 2005)

Met Staffer Harsh on Met Plunder

Fragmentary Calyx Krater (vase -- circa 510bc) signed by Euphronios.  Depicts the death of Kyknos in battle with Herakles.   Height 17-3/4" and 75% plastic sold at Sotheby's, New York in 1990 for $1.7m from the Nelson Bunker Hunt collection.

Image:  Sotheby's, New York  The auction catalogue reads: " The Hunt calyx krater, in grandeur of form, style and subject, relates closely to the two relatively complete examples signed by Euphronios, those in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first painted with the combat between Herakles and Antaios, the second with the death of Sarpedon, a subject which he repeats, later in the narrative, on the Hunt kylix."

[Click here: artnet.com Magazine Features - Super Art Gems of New York City ]

via Artnet News, 1/13/06:

ANCIENT ART IS PLUNDER: MET STAFFER
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been "supporting theft and plunder for years," according to archeologist Oscar White Muscarella -- a longtime employee of the very same museum that he so harshly criticizes. In a ferocious interview with reporter Suzan Mazur published in Scoop, an "internet news agency" based in New Zealand, Muscarella compares U.S. museums to bordellos, and says that "collecting antiquities is rape." He calls the Met’s department of Greek and Roman art "The Temple of Plunder," and extends his indictment to other museum departments as well, saying that his museum’s Asian art department holds "hundreds and hundreds [of artifacts] from temples and tombs from all over Cambodia, Thailand, China, just to decorate vitrines in the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The job of the antiquities curator, Muscarella says, is to "buy stolen art" and "get false documents."

"All these museums are actively engaged in erasing this planet’s history," Muscarella says. As an archeologist, he argues that ancient artifacts should only be excavated scientifically by professionals, with objects and their contexts carefully documented. What’s the answer to the current controversy over ownership of disputed cultural property? New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg should "order" the Met to "stop buying stolen objects right now," and telephone the Italian consul in New York and tell him to come "in 10 minutes, 15 minutes" and pick up the controversial Euphronios vase. [For a detailed report by former Met director Thomas Hoving on the museum’s so-called "Hot Pot," see "Super Art Gems of New York City," June 29, 2001.]

What’s more, Muscarella accuses New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, who has been critical of lax museum acquisition policies, of being "dishonest" and "getting paid to write. . . a cover up," apparently due to a perceived conflict of interest of newspaper owner Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who is a Metropolitan Museum trustee. Muscarella refers to Kimmelman -- and other critics who review exhibitions of ancient art without mentioning "plunder" -- as "pimps." In an email, Kimmelman called Muscarella’s charges "too silly to take seriously," and says that Muscarella "clearly knows nothing" about how the Times works.

Muscarella says that the Met fired him in the early 1970s, but he was able to retain his position at the museum after a long court battle. "I just don't understand why anyone who hates museums would work in a museum," commented Met communications director Harold Holzer to the Village Voice in 2003.

related articles by Suzan Mazur (Scoop):

When A Cup Is Not A Cup: Euphronios Ancient Art In Court
Friday, 4 November 2005, 12:48 pm

The Provenance Of Bob Hecht
Tuesday, 15 November 2005, 4:03 pm

The Medici Go-Round: Sotheby's & The Signed Euphronios
Thursday, 1 December 2005, 2:12 pm

Suzan Mazur: Bob Hecht, The Younger
Tuesday, 6 December 2005, 4:58 pm

more via Artforum News:

New Anti-Trafficking Unit; Italy Proposes Deal with the Met
01.13.06 - Jason Edward Kaufman writes for the Art Newspaper on New York's first task force "dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking." The unit will be established by Manhattan's district attorney Robert Morgenthau and led by lawyer Matthew Bogdanos, who may be better known as the US Marine Corps Reserves colonel who led the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum. Elsewhere, the New York Times's Hugh Eakin reports that the Italian government has relayed a formal proposal to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would grant the museum special access to long-term loans in exchange for the return of twenty works of Greek and Roman art. The proposed accord would avert possible legal steps against the museum by the Italian government.

 

The African art "that doesn't get into galleries"

via the Guardian Unlimited (Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005):

This year's African art exhibitions were meant to make us think again about the continent. But if admiring art was enough to change the world, African would have got justice long ago, says Jonathan Jones. He decided to go in search of the art that doesn't get into galleries, but has real function in the lives of ordinary Africans ... [read the full article]

"If the history of Africa tells us anything, it is that producing great art is no guarantee of winning anyone's respect. It seems incredible, when you look at the masterpieces of African art in the British Museum, that exploiters and imperialists could ever have dismissed the disparate peoples of Africa as lesser breeds, ripe for the plucking. Africa has created some of the greatest art that ever existed, and the brilliance of it has been known to Europeans for a long time. In the British Museum, there are ivory salt cellars carved by artists in the west African city of Benin for Portuguese trade in the Renaissance. The brass plaques that decorated the Oba's palace in Benin - which are also in the museum - with their snake-spirit soldiers and blocky, massive strength, were seen and admired by Europeans. The palace was even depicted in print in the 17th century. None of this prevented the British from eradicating the entire civilisation in a single bloody "punitive expedition" in 1897 ...

"And this is what I found myself inarticulately trying to explain earlier this year after it was proposed that I go to Africa as an art critic. I wanted to get away entirely from the art that might be presented at the Hayward, and to try to see how art fits into, and perhaps even enriches, the lives of ordinary people. It seems to me that, as African poverty continues to scar the world's conscience, it doesn't really matter whether African art makes it in London. But maybe art - the form of creativity that human beings have been addicted to longest - might have a function in the lives of the poor. I didn't want to know what was hot in Johannesburg galleries, I wanted to know what forms of visual culture might actually be of use to those who have nothing ..."