Playing hide and seek with Yinka Shonibare

I’ve never quite understood the concept of reassembling historic rooms, putting a red velvet rope around it, and funneling tourists on a counter-intuitive path through a house, castle, or museum. But once Yinka Shonibare placed child figures ducking under desks…

Tut v. Franklin

It’s the dog days of summer and things have clearly slowed down around here, with SD’ers in various foreign places enjoying themselves. Nothing jolts us up out of our slumber faster, though, than learning about the protest of the curators…

fra-gi-le. must be italian!

LA’s best museum-on-top-of-a-3-mile-trolley-ride just got pwn3d, agreeing to hand over 40 antiquities to Italy. The Eye-talians claim the historic artworks, including a sculpture from the 5th century BC depicting Aphrodite, were plundered from their soil by the evil Getty.  The…

your glossy pamphlet supports terr’ism

What happens to a catalogue when its museum is blown to bits? It becomes a price guide for thieves! Now you too can own your own rare edition of this necessary black market guide, the 1974 Afghanistan National Museum catalogue.

Over…

a visit to the shrink: totem and taboo

Rumor has it the American Museum of Natural History still has a shrunken head or two buried deep in the bowels of its collection. Doc Bwana, however, would rather leave fancy words like “repatriation” and “postcolonialism” to the academics in…