Tag Archives: Acropolis-Museum

George Clooney is in Bed With Me

Art, Athens, Cultural Travel, Destinations, Greece, News, Travel, , , , ,
The Parthenon in Athens, Greece
The Parthenon in Athens, Greece
George Clooney
George Clooney from Wikipedia, Photographer: Nicolas Genin from Paris, France

George Clooney agrees that Britain should do the right thing and return the statues stolen by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens. Clooney, joined by Matt Damon and Bill Murray made this statement to the London Paper The Guardian while promoting his film The Monument Men, which is about rescuing art and artifacts.

And now the British Museum is sticking a thumb in the eye of the Greeks with a brand new exhibit on the human body in Greek Art–featuring guess what? The Parthenon statues of course.  Why? Because, as this article in the Guardian points out, the Greek artifacts are a real money maker for the British Museum.  Attendance was up last year by 20%, and the Parthenon art has been one of the major draws for years, even supporting its own audio tour and gift shop. The Guardian, in an article about the new Greek sculpture show said,

…director Neil MacGregor said the exhibition, planned for next spring, would include “key loans”, he refused to say whether the museum will be seeking any of the sculptures from the Parthenon temple thatGreece still holds or any other loans from Greece.

Fat chance!

Ever since I visited the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, I have felt strongly that Great Britain should do the right thing and give back the statues from the Parthenon.

I’ve written frequently about my strong feelings about this looted art, and am so glad to have George Clooney in bed with me…oh, wait a minute….that’s not quite the right phrase, is it?

 

Parthenon sculpture
Freize from Parthenon in British Museum

Here are the articles at A Traveler’s Library, starting with the very first book I reviewed at A Traveler’s Library.

Loot, a review of a book about collecting antiquities of other countries.

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens, and quotes from an article by Christopher Hitchens.

Lord Byron speaks about the theft from the Acropolis.

A video about the New Acropolis Museum in this post about Greek Week at A Traveler’s Library.

You can get an idea of the strongly felt feelings on the issue from the comments on YouTube about this video (48 minutes). If the whole thing is too long for you, don’t miss actor Steven Fry, starting at just after 12 minutes in.

Travel to the New Acropolis Museum

Athens, Destinations, Greece, Museums, News, , , , , , ,
The Acropolis Museum beneath the Parthenon
The Acropolis Museum beneath the Parthenon

Tomorrow, at long last, is the day. After a week of sneak-previews, the Acropolis Museum (having dropped the “new”, I believe) will open to the public–residents, tourists, everybody. The new web site opened with much fanfare. In typical Greek fashion, it was mostly unfinished as I write this in June 2009. Whole pages are blank. It reminds me of the houses you see in the countryside in Greece–concrete block walls partly finished with rebar sticking out the top. But eventually it will get done. The most essential page–where you buy tickets–is finished. And this is a big deal, because this is the first museum in Athens to offer tickets on the Internet.

Since I cannot travel to Greece for the opening, I’ve been traveling around the web gathering news.  So much is being written in newspapers, magazines and on web sites about the Acropolis Museum, about Greece, about the British Museum, about the British Museum vs. the Acropolis Museum…… that I decided just to hand you some references and let you go off to read these good sources, instead of risking repetitive redundancy. If you read nothing else, please read the Vanity Fair article by Christopher Hitchens.

  • Reuters reports that 200 fragments are returned To Greece by various European countries. (https://reut.rs/2Q0gPNl)
  • A blog called “looting matters” that discusses the ethical concerns of collection of antiquities (https://lootingmatters.blogspot.com)
  • Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens weighs in.(https://bit.ly/2z9riMK)

Note: Hitchens wrote a book called  The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification, and it is worth quoting a couple of paragraphs from his article in Vanity Fair, particularly since just yesterday we were talking about Euripedes and Sophocles, Medea and Antigone:

“When we think of Athens in the fifth century b.c., we think chiefly of the theater of Euripides and Sophocles and of philosophy and politics—specifically democratic politics, of the sort that saw Pericles repeatedly re-elected in spite of complaints that he was overspending. And it’s true that Antigone was first performed as the Parthenon was rising, and Medea not all that long after the temple was finished. From drama to philosophy: Socrates himself was also a stonemason and sculptor, and it seems quite possible that he too took part in raising the edifice.”

“If the Mona Lisa had been sawed in two during the Napoleonic Wars and the separated halves had been acquired by different museums in, say, St. Petersburg and Lisbon, would there not be a general wish to see what they might look like if re-united? If you think my analogy is overdrawn, consider this: the body of the goddess Iris is at present in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London, and the rear part is in Athens. And so on. This is grotesque.”