On a recent visit to New York City, I had the opportunity to walk around the exterior of the new Whitney Museum, built at a cost of $442 million. It is a monument of a kind: to the vanity, egotism, and aesthetic incompetence of celebrity architects such as Renzo Piano, and to the complete loss of judgment and taste of modern patrons.
If it were not a tragic lost opportunity (how often do architects have the chance to build an art gallery at such cost?), it would be comic. I asked the person with whom I was walking what he would think the building was for if he didn’t know. The façade — practically without windows — looked as if it could be the central torture chambers of the secret police, from which one half expects the screams of the tortured to emerge. Certainly, it was a façade for those with something to hide: perhaps appropriately so, given the state of so much modern art.
The building was a perfect place from which to commit suicide, with what looked like large diving boards emerging from the top of the building, leading straight to the ground far below. Looking up at them, one could almost hear in one’s mind’s ear the terrible sound of the bodies as they landed on the ground below. There were also some (for now) silvery industrial chimneys, leading presumably from the incinerators so necessary for the disposal of rubbishy art. The whole building lacked harmony, as if struck already by an earthquake and in a half-collapsed state; it’s a tribute to the imagination of the architect that something so expensive should be made to look so cheap. It is certain to be shabby within a decade.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Monument to Tastelessness: The new Whitney Museum looks like a torture chamber”, City Journal, 2015-04-22.
December 18, 2016
QotD: The new Whitney Museum in New York City
November 20, 2016
Know your audience, children’s division
M. Harold Page, guest-posting at Charles Stross’s blog:
Little Harry blinks at me through his heavy Sellotaped glasses. “What’s that for?”
“It’s a submachine gun,” I say. “It fires lots of bullets.” I mime. “Bang bang bang!”
I’m helping out on a school trip. Normally I avoid volunteering – it’s too easy for self employed parents to end up as the school’s go-to. However this visit is to Edinburgh Castle and my daughter Morgenstern was very keen I should put in a showing…
So here I am helping to herd 5-year olds through the military museum. Morgenstern is nowhere in sight, but little Harry has latched onto me.
“Oh,” says Harry. He copies my mime and sprays the room. “Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.”
“Not like that,” I say. “Three round bursts or you’ll run out of bullets. Plus the thing pulls up.” I mime. “So like this: Bang bang bang!… Bang bang bang!”
Solemnly, Harry discharges three imaginary bullets. “Bang bang bang!”
“Right,” I say, “Now, the other side have guns too. You have to use cover… better if you have a hand grenade, of course.”
His blue eyes widen. “What’s a hand grenade?”
So together we have a great time clearing each gallery with imagined grenade, automatic fire and bayonet.
Later on the way back to the bus Harry says, “My Daddy says wars are bad because people get killed…”
Yes, I had in fact spent the afternoon teaching (my best recollection of) World War Two house clearing tactics to the son of a local clergyman and peace activist.
June 29, 2016
Tankfest 2016 at the Bovington Tank Museum
Published on 28 Jun 2016
What I did on my holidays by The Mighty Jingles age 46 and a bit. TANKS!
The Tank Museum – http://www.tankmuseum.org/home
Upcoming Events at The Tank Museum:
Tanks in Action – 21 Jul – 02 Sep
Attack of the Daleks – 23/24 Jul
Warfare through the Ages – 06/07 Aug
Tank 100 – 17 Sep
Tank Experience Day – 30 Sep – 01 Oct
Access All Areas – 13 Oct
May 7, 2016
Tiger Day 2016 at The Bovington Tank Museum
Published on 4 May 2016
This weekend we popped down to the Tank Museum for a spot of big game hunting. Tigers, Leopards, Comets…. okay the analogy starts to break down a bit now…
November 2, 2015
The National Air Force Museum of Canada
Elizabeth and I spent the weekend in the Bay of Quinte area, visiting Prince Edward County, Belleville, and Trenton. While we were in Trenton, we stopped in at the National Air Force Museum of Canada. While the Sea King may not be in the collection yet (at least, not in the collection visible to the public), many other Canadian Armed Forces aircraft are, including the prize of the museum, the Handley Page Halifax heavy bomber:
It’s a big enough aircraft that it’s hard to do it justice in a photograph.
This particular restored aircraft was shot down late in the war on a mission to deliver supplies to Norwegian resistance fighters and later recovered from a Norwegian lake.
Other aircraft in the collection include a replica of the Silver Dart, the first powered aircraft to fly in Canada (February 23, 1909), a replica of the Burgess-Dunne floatplane, the first aircraft purchased for the Canadian military (September, 1914), a CF-86 Sabre, a CF-100 Canuck, a CF-5 Freedom Fighter, a CF-104 Starfighter, a CF-101 Voodoo, a CF-18 Hornet, a CP-107 Argus, a CC-130 Hercules, and a CP-102 Tracker among other aircraft.
July 22, 2015
MetCollects—Episode 14: Michael Gallagher on “Everhard Jabach and His Family”
Published on 9 Jun 2015
“What does it take to revive a masterwork?” Michael Gallagher on conserving Charles Le Brun’s Everhard Jabach and His Family
Charles Le Brun (French, 1619–1690). Everhard Jabach (1618–1695) and His Family, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas; 110 1/4 x 129 1/8 in. (280 x 328 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honor of Keith Christiansen, 2014 (2014.250)
H/T to Open Culture:
Long considered lost, the life-size family portrait of the artist’s friend, a leading banker and art collector, was in sorry shape when the Metropolitan Museum acquired it from a private collection earlier last year.
Gallagher worked for ten months to counteract the various indignities it had suffered, including a re-stretching that left the original canvas severely creased, and a Gilded Age application of varnish that weathered poorly over time.
It’s a painstaking process, restoring such a work to its original glory, requiring countless Q-tips and a giant roller that allowed staffers to safely flip all 9 x 10.75 feet of the massive canvas. Gallagher identifies the last step, a sprayed-on coat of varnish necessary for teasing out the painting’s original luster, as the most nerve-wracking part of the odyssey.
May 21, 2015
The Brunel Museum
Brid-Aine Parnell talks about the Brunels — father, son, and grandson — and their impact on Britain during the industrial revolution:
When you mention Brunel to most people, they think of the one with the funny name – Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A few folks will know that his father Marc Isambard Brunel was the first famous engineering Brunel, but not many will know that Isambard’s own son, Henry Marc Brunel, was also an engineer and finished some of Isambard’s projects after his death.
Between the three of them, the Brunels created landmarks all over the UK; perhaps most famously the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which spans the Avon Gorge, linking Clifton in Bristol to Leigh Woods in Somerset.
That bridge, which Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed and often called his “first child,” wasn’t actually completed until after his death and only came about at all because Isambard was nearly drowned in an accident at the massive project he was working on in London with his father: the Thames Tunnel.
It is this masterpiece of engineering, which invented new methods of tunnelling underground and is why the Brunels are credited with creating underground transportation – and by extension, the modern city itself – that you see if you go along to the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe, London.
The museum itself is in Marc Brunel’s Engine House, built in 1842, the year before the Thames Tunnel was opened, for the engines that pumped to keep the Tunnel dry. The small exhibition tells the story of the design and construction of the 396-metre-long tunnel, the first to have been successfully built underneath a navigable river. The display panels also detail the innovative tunnelling shield technique invented by Marc and Isambard that’s still used to build tunnels today, although these days it’s machines doing the hard work instead of men. Back then, labourers would spent two hours at a time digging, often while also being gassed and showered with shit.
The River Thames at that time was the sewer of London and the tunnel was constantly waterlogged, leading to a build up of effluent and methane gas. The result was that not only would miners pass out from the gas – even if they didn’t, men who re-surfaced were left senseless after their two-hour shift – but there were also explosions as the gas was set alight by the miners’ candles.
Although it’s a tidy and well-kept little exhibition, it is not really why you come to the museum. You come for the underground chamber below, which was only opened up to the public in 2010 after 150 years of being closed off by the London transportation system. This is the Grand Entrance Hall to the Thames Tunnel, used in Brunel’s day as a concert hall and fairground and now in the process of being turned into a permanent exhibition.
March 6, 2015
ISIS takes sledgehammers and drills to ancient artifacts
This makes me sick to my stomach:
These images and many more are screencapped from a propaganda video released by ISIS, reported by Conflict Antiquities:
It is notable that the Islamic State released this propaganda, to assert their religious purity through their commitment to cultural destruction, immediately after the were exposed for making a deal with Turkey and not destroying Suleyman Shah’s tomb.
Last June, it was rumoured and mistakenly reported that the Islamic State had ‘destroyed ancient masterpieces, including the rare Assyrian winged bull’ at Nineveh Museum. This time, they’ve done it — at Mosul Museum and the Nergal Gate to Nineveh [the Nergal Gate Museum at Nineveh]. You can stream or download the mp4 (or watch it on YouTube/YouTube archive).
But if, like other sensible people, you don’t want to boost the web traffic to their pornography of violence — which they try to advertise as Islamic although they also preserve “heretical”, “idolatrous” things as long as they profit from them — I’ve taken screenshots from the video for verification and analysis. Christopher Jones, at the Gates of Nineveh, has ongoing, historically-informed coverage of this and other destruction, including Assessing the Damage at the Mosul Museum, Part 1: the Assyrian Artifacts.
November 25, 2014
Replica WW1 tanks at the Tank Museum
While they’re not true replica vehicles, the British Mark IV and the German A7V tanks can be seen at the Tank Museum in Bovington:
Uploaded on 11 Jan 2012
The Tank Museum has obtained the tank used in Steven Spielberg’s new World War One blockbuster Warhorse.
The fully operational replica of a British Mk IV tank is set to go on display when the film is released next week, and will also be used in the Dorset based Museum’s tank displays later in the year.
The full sized replica was based on the Museum’s own Mark IV, which was built in 1917. OSCAR award-wining special effects company Neil Corbould Special Effects LTD, whose credits include Saving Private Ryan and Gladiator, visited The Tank Museum in 2010 to take measurements from the vehicle and copy original documents related to the MK IV tank held in the Museum’s Archive.
Published on 30 Nov 2012
The Tank Museum has acquired a working replica of a German First World War tank. See it in action here, alongside our British First World War replica from the film War Horse. For more information, visit www.tankmuseum.org.
October 8, 2014
Russia’s oldest warship being moved to shipyard for restoration work
From the Wikipedia page:
Aurora (Russian: Авро́ра, tr. Avrora; IPA: [ɐˈvrorə]) is a 1900 Russian protected cruiser, currently preserved as a museum ship in St. Petersburg. Aurora was one of three Pallada-class cruisers, built in St. Petersburg for service in the Pacific Far East. All three ships of this class served during the Russo-Japanese War. The Aurora survived the Battle of Tsushima and was interned under U.S. protection in the Philippines, eventually returned to the Baltic Fleet. The second ship, Pallada, was sunk by the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904. The third ship, Diana, was interned in Saigon after the Battle of the Yellow Sea. One of the first incidents of the October Revolution in Russia took place on the cruiser Aurora.
[…]
During World War I Aurora operated in the Baltic Sea performing patrols and shore bombardment tasks. In 1915, her armament was changed to fourteen 152 mm (6 in) guns. At the end of 1916, she was moved to Petrograd (the renamed St Petersburg) for a major repair. The city was brimming with revolutionary ferment and part of her crew joined the 1917 February Revolution. A revolutionary committee was created on the ship, with Aleksandr Belyshev elected as captain. Most of the crew joined the Bolsheviks, who were preparing for a Communist revolution.
At 9.45 p.m on 25 October 1917 (O.S.) a blank shot from her forecastle gun signaled the start of the assault on the Winter Palace, which was to be the beginning of the October Revolution. In summer 1918, she was relocated to Kronstadt and placed into reserve.
September 15, 2014
RCAF “raids” air force museum for spare parts
We often joke about the “museum pieces” that the Canadian Armed Forces have to operate, due to very long procurement processes and budget shortfalls, but this is the first time I’ve heard of scavenging spare parts from actual museum displays:
The Ottawa Citizen has learned that in July 2012 air force technicians raided an old Hercules airplane that is on display at the National Air Force Museum of Canada because they needed navigational equipment for a similar aircraft still in use.
The revelation highlights the difficulties military personnel have increasingly faced in keeping Canada’s ancient search-and-rescue planes flying after more than a decade of government promises to buy replacements.
The air force museum is at Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Ont., and boasts a large collection of military aircraft that have been retired and subsequently placed on display.
[…]
“They sort of called (Colton) up and said ‘Hey, we have these two INUs that we can’t use. Do you have any on yours?’ ” Windsor said. “Some of the parts are interchangeable. They just kind of got lucky on that.”
Defence Minister Rob Nicholson’s office defended the air force’s decision to ask a museum for parts to keep its search-and-rescue planes flying.
“The RCAF took the initiative to remove these functional, perfectly good parts and use them effectively,” spokeswoman Johanna Quinney said in an email.
But former head of military procurement Dan Ross said it’s “embarrassing” that the air force has to “cannibalize old stuff that’s in museums” to keep its planes flying.
Update, 16 September: The story triggered a question to the minister in parliament.
NDP defence critic Jack Harris: “Mr. Speaker, the government’s failed plans to replace Canada’s aging search and rescue aircraft hit a new low with the news that the RCAF had to source parts from a 50-year-old plane on display at the National Air Force Museum. It would be funny if it were not for the fact that Canadians rely on the Hercules and Buffalo aircraft to respond to thousands of emergencies every year. Though started by the Liberals in 2002, there will not be replacement planes in operation until 2019, at the earliest.
Does the minister simply expect the RCAF to raid other museums in the meantime?
Defence Minister Rob Nicholson responded: “What the honourable member was referring to was a mistake. When it was discovered, the RCAF took the appropriate measures. That being said, this is the government that has delivered 17 new Hercules transport aircraft, four strategic transports, and 15 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters. How did the NDP vote? The NDP voted against all of these; every dollar for the military is opposed by the NDP.”
Not sure what Nicholson meant by “a mistake.” He didn’t elaborate in the House of Commons.
But it’s different than the earlier response from his office, which acknowledged the scavenging and praised it as taking the “initiative.”
July 18, 2013
Chinese museum woes – “80 of the museum’s 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic”
Tom Phillips on the sudden closure of the Jibaozhai Museum:
The museum’s public humiliation began earlier this month when Ma Boyong, a Chinese writer, noticed a series of inexplicable discrepancies during a visit and posted his findings online.
Among the most striking errors were artifacts engraved with writing purportedly showing that they dated back more than 4,000 years to the times of China’s Yellow Emperor. However, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily the writing appeared in simplified Chinese characters, which only came into widespread use in the 20th century.
The collection also contained a “Tang Dynasty” five-colour porcelain vase despite the fact that this technique was only invented hundreds of years later, during the Ming Dynasty.
Museum staff tried to play down the scandal.
Wei Yingjun, the museum’s chief consultant, conceded the museum did not have the proper provincial authorizations to operate but said he was “quite positive” that at least 80 of the museum’s 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic.
“I’m positive that we do have authentic items in the museum. There might be fake items too but we would need [to carry out] identification and verification [to confirm that],” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Mr Wei said that objects of “dubious” origin had been “marked very clearly” so as not to mislead visitors and vowed to sue Mr Ma, the whistle-blowing writer, for blackening the museum’s name.
May 8, 2013
Winnipeg’s Museum for Human Rights
Mark Steyn talks about the spectacle of “bickering genocides” as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights attempts to pay equal attention to all victims of genocide:
My sometime boss the late Izzy Asper was a media magnate whose lifelong dream was a world-class Holocaust memorial in his home town of Winnipeg. For the usual diversity-celebrating reasons, it evolved into a more general “Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” and is now lumbering toward its opening date under the aegis of Izzy’s daughter, Gail. Having been put through the mill by Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions, I naturally despise any juxtaposition of the words “Canadian” and “human rights.” But if you have to yoke them, this is the place: To paraphrase Justin’s fellow musician Joni Mitchell, they took all the rights and put ’em in a rights museum, and they charged the people a dollar-and-a-half just to see ’em.
But I’ve warmed up to what the blogger Scaramouche calls the Canadian Mausoleum for Human Rights. It could have been just the usual sucking maw of public monies had it not descended into an hilarious, er, urinating match of competing victimhoods. For those who thought “human rights” had something to do with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so forth, it turns out to be about which guy’s genocide is bigger. The Ukrainian-Canadian Congress was wary of the mausoleum from the get-go, suspicious that it would downplay the Holodomor, Stalin’s enforced famine in the Ukraine 80 years ago. The mausoleum assured them that they were going to go big on the Holodomor, but to guarantee the UCC came onboard offered to throw in a bonus exhibit of Canada’s internment of Ukrainian immigrants during World War I. This would be part of “Canada’s Journey,” a heartwarming historical pageant illustrating how the blood-soaked Canadian state has perpetrated one atrocity after another on native children, Chinese coolies, Japanese internees, Jews, gays, the transgendered, you name it. And, of course, the Ukrainians. Per Izzy’s wishes, the Holocaust would have pride of place in a separate exhibit, because, its dark bloody history notwithstanding, Canada apparently played a minimal role in the murder of six million Jews. However, the Holodomor would be included as a permanent featured genocide in the museum’s “Mass Atrocity Zone.”
Oh, you can laugh at the idea of a “Mass Atrocity Zone” tourist attraction in Winnipeg, but there isn’t an ethnic lobby group that doesn’t want in. The Polish-Canadian Congress complained that lumping all the non-Jew genocides in one Mass Atrocity Zone meant they’d have to be on a rotating schedule, like revolving pies on the lunch counter. The Armenian genocide was felt to be getting short shrift, considering it was the prototype 20th-century genocide. On the other hand, the Rwandan genocide, the last big 20th-century genocide, and the Congolese civil war don’t appear to have got a look-in at all. The Poles wanted room made for the Germans’ ill treatment of the Poles, which did not seem to be a priority of the mausoleum.
March 29, 2013
Duffel Blog: F-35 inducted into NYC Air Museum
A scoop from the keen bunch at The Duffel Blog:
Sources confirmed that the F-35 Lightning II was inducted yesterday into the Intrepid, Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York City. The closed door ceremony was the high point for the F-35, capping off the fighter’s illustrious warfighting career as the most colossal fuck-up in military acquisition history.
Speaking to Duffel Blog reporters, museum curator Saul Rosenblatt said, “We weren’t sure if the F-35 was up to snuff as an exhibit in this museum. We take great pride in displaying planes with a robust combat history, like the A-4 Skyhawk and the A-6 Intruder. We passed on the F-22 Raptor because that was an even bigger piece of shit fighter jet. We had no choice but to display the F-35 between the crapper and the concession stand.”
[. . .]
“At a cost of over $137 million per plane, it makes the surface area underneath the exhibit’s landing gear the most expensive real estate in New York City. Per square foot, this will drive up apartment values across the entire West Side,” said an overjoyed real estate agent.
“For the project’s total cost of almost $400 billion you could have bought the Louvre and had some money left to shop at Saks,” a downtown designer told TDB. When asked his opinion about the F-35, construction worker Dominick Antonelli said “that’s all we need here, another overpaid, sucky, New York Jet.”
August 29, 2012
Does your Paleontology department need a visit from the “Pizazz!!!” marketing consultants?
Lore Sjöberg likes dinosaurs, and thinks paleontologists have an awesome job … but that too many of them are phoning it in in the “naming newly identified dinosaurs” department:
In zoology, whoever discovers a new species gets to name it. Normally this isn’t a big deal; at this point, the only living animal species being discovered are either some isolated sea slug or some type of antelope that everyone thought was the same as another type of antelope, but it turns out they can’t interbreed so — two different antelopes. In the latter case, everyone’s just going to keep calling it “an antelope” and in the former case, who cares?
However, there is one situation where animals are being given names that people are actually going to use, and that’s dinosaurs. Paleontologists have an awesome responsibility, as well as an awesome job. Whatever they name their long-extinct terrible lizards, that’s the name, and there’s a decent chance it’s going to show up on film or as a stuffed animal in a museum gift shop.
Some dinosaur names are ideal. Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, is objectively the best name that anything has ever had, with Wolf Blitzer coming in a distant second. And there’s the Triceratops, which sounds cool and means “three-horned face,” and also Pentaceratops, which is, OK, kind of derivative, but I’m still hoping they eventually discover a Hexaceratops.
Sadly, however, not all scientists are equally inspired. Here are a few dinosaurs that, international rules for nomenclature be damned, need new names.
Like most kids, I was fascinated by dinosaurs and one of the (few) highlight of the public school year was the (usually) annual trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto with their dinosaur displays. Yet every time I happen to see dinosaurs mentioned in the popular press these days, it’s almost always some killjoy paleontologist trying to strike one of those cool dinosaur names by “reclassifying” to either an unreadable/unpronounceable Latin tag or a name that’s so heart-stoppingly boring that it might as well be a serial number.
Unless it’s some deep-seated conspiracy to make paleontology as uncool as accountancy or technical writing, I can’t understand why so many scientists seem to want to kill the natural joy so many of us found when we first learned about their topic of study.
Update: Brian Switek responds to Sjöberg’s complaints in the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.
Now, there are some dinosaur names that I’m not totally enamored with. While I understand the dinosaur’s symbolic status, Bicentenaria argentina doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and the same goes for the unevocative Panamericansaurus (yes, named after Pan American Energy). Then there are the names that appeal to the more puerile portion of my sense of humor. Read the name Texasetes too fast and you may get the dinosaur confused with a part of the male anatomy (not to mention the actual debate over whether the name of Megalosaurus should really be “Scrotum“), and you should always be careful with the pronunciation of Fukuiraptor unless you’re actually trying to insult the allosaur.
But what baffles me is that Sjöberg didn’t pick any of these names. Instead, his list includes the likes of Spinosaurus and Giraffatitan. I get his beef with dinosaurs named after places (Albertosaurus, Edmontosaurus, etc.), and I agree that Gasosaurus was comically unimaginative, but Iguanodon? The second dinosaur ever named, and one of the most iconic prehistoric creatures named for the clue in its teeth that led Gideon Mantell to rightly hypothesize that the dinosaur was an immense herbivore? I have to wonder whether Sjöberg would consider “Iguanasaurus – the original proposed name for the dinosaur – to be a step back or an improvement.
I just don’t get Sjöberg’s contention that Giraffatitan is “terrible” because – *gasp* – the sauropod wasn’t actually a big giraffe. Strict literalism only in naming dinosaurs, please. And, really, what would Sjöberg suggest as a replacement for Spinosaurus? When Ernst Stromer found the theropod, the most distinctive thing about the dinosaur was its enormous vertebral spines. What would you call it? Suchomimus – a cousin of Spinosaurus – is a little more poetic, but I like Stromer’s choice just fine.
