Curator & Collector

Some days ago, I read a rather long article by Eva Schulz entitled “Notes on the history of collecting and of museums in the light of selected literature of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century” (Journal of the History of Collections, 1990, vol. 2. no. 2). The article was quite interesting, but one part stood [...]

Exterior of Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, BC Inside this small, unassuming building is a physical space that is his home to one of Vancouver’s oldest Anglican congregations and a number of artworks and artefacts of some significance. This church, which sits on Burrard Street in Vancouver’s downtown, was unlocked for the Olympics, when I [...]

Bill Reid’s sculpture “The Raven and the First Men,” yellow cedar version in the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to visit again Bill Reid’s wonderful sculpture The Raven and the First Men on the official reopening day of the Bill Reid Rotunda in the Museum [...]

Image of 1000 year-old Islamic Crystal Decanter taken from the CBC Christie’s in London is auctioning what is considered to be a rare crystal decanter dating back to the Fatimid rulers of Cairo, Egypt. The decanter, which was carved from a single piece of crystal, was initially described as a 19th century artefact. It was [...]

Note: today’s post is related primarily to the Law, but it does have ramifications for arts and culture, too. I post it here because I view it as the most important issue of the day. [crossposted from another blog of mine] Today is the final day of the hearing in my province, BC, at which [...]

A Sikh organization in India, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, was successful in lobbying Sotheby’s to cancel its plans to auction an armour suit believed to have belonged to the tenth guru, Gobind Singh. The group wrote a letter to the Queen, and was prepared to to take its protest to the United Nations in [...]

An exhibit in a Catholic Museum in Vienna recently sparked a controversy after one of the artworks showed a homosexual orgy transpiring at the Last Supper. The art was being exhibited in a retrospective titled “Religion, Flesh, and Power,” a tribute to the eighty year-old Alfred Hrdlicka, one of Austria’s leading artists. Other artwork displayed [...]

A couple of donations to museums to report today. First, the Bank of America has just donated one million dollars to Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Discovery and Science, while Anthony d’Offay, a British collector and dealer, has “donated” 75 paintings to British museums. He will sell them for his cost, about $55 million; the paintings [...]