Diplomatic Mission to the East Midlands

After an indecently early train journey, Arwa and I were treated to a really excellent and diverse series of papers and events bookended by keynote speakers Dr. Kostas Arvanitis and Professor Sue Pearce. All the papers, including my own garbled attempt, were heroically summarised live by Leicester PhD student Jenny. You can find them, and much else besides, on the Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones Blog.

Svalbard Museum

For the last couple of years my dad has been working on a project in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Despite being the largest town in Svalbard, Longyearbyen is tiny with around 2060 inhabitants! In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people came to Svalbard to hunt whales and seals, and the islands teemed with Dutch, British, Russian and Scandinavian whalers. Since the early twentieth century, coal has been Svalbard's gold and a lot of people have made a fortune from this industry (not my dad...) Think of it as the Norwegian equivalent of Jersey...

On his last trip over my dad managed to visit the Svalbard Museum, which just so happens to be the northernmost museum in the world! The museum first opened in 1979, and until December 2005 it was located in the oldest part of Longyearbyen. The new Svalbard Museum opened on 26th April 2006 in the Svalbard Science Centre, together with The University Centre in Svalbard, The Norwegian Polar Institute and The Governor of Svalbard's environalmental information. The main aim of the museum is 'to impart knowledge and understanding of the relations between nature, culture, landscape, human activity, technology and the environment in the Arctic.' The museum also engages in research to discover new ways of life and standard of living through 400 years of human activity in Svalbard. More museum orientated tasks include the coordination of all of the museum collections in Svalbard into a common record, providing access for all to the historical material and records. The photo collection is being uploaded onto the museum website at the moment....

http://karmatrendz.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/svalbard_science_centre_05.jpg Check out the external architecture of the museum....postmodern architect meets curator?

Check out the website and let me know what you think to the museum...there is a virtual tour type thing (not too dissimilar to The Talking Walls application I mentioned in my earlier post!) which allows you to look at the exhibitions more closely...

http://www.svalbardmuseum.no/eindex.php?kategori=1

Leeds Public Art Map

Here's a sneak preview of the Leeds Public Art Map made in collaboration with the Leeds Public Arts Officer, which you'll hopefully see embedded in the Leeds Art Gallery website and elsewhere very soon. We've had lots of interesting conversations over the last six months about what constitutes the 'public' and 'art' of public art and how best to determine and collate the knowledges that surround these interventions into the social sphere. Hopefully this map represents a template which will be edited and added to, documenting also what is lost, temporary and still in production. I'd be very interested to see what you all think, there's a link to the full version at the bottom of the map.

View Public Art in Leeds in a larger map

Perspectives on the Art Market Series II

Hello All,

we welcomed, on Thursday 3rd December, our speaker for Series II of our 'Perspectives on the Art Market' talks, Adrianna Turpin, Academic Director of the MA in History and Business of Art and Collecting at the Institute d'Etudes Superieures des Arts in Paris and the Wallace Collection in London. Adrianna gave a fascinating paper on the the subject of 'Commerce and Collecting in London and Paris in the early Nineteenth Century'.
Her talk built on her chapter on William Beckford and the market for antique French furniture in the period c.1789-c.1845 published in the exhibition catalogue 'William Beckford: an eye for the magnificent', edited by Derek Ostergard (2001), which was associated with the exhibition staged at the Bard Graduate Center in New York in 2001 and Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2002 (I went along, it was fantastic!)
The talk was very well attended, with virtually all our MA students and quite a few students from the undergraduate programme, as well as PhD students and members of staff. Adrianna usefully highlighted the methodological problems of attempting to track changing prices and their meanings, as objects are put into circulation through historic art markets. This was a thoughful and thought-provoking talk and I'm sure we all thank Adrianna for coming all the way from London to speak to us.

There are more talks in the 'Perspectives on the Art Market' series in the new year...watch this space!
Mark

Manchester MA Field Trip

Hello All,

our semester 1 visit to Manchester took place last week, and (I think) we had an interesting time...although I forgot how long the walk was from the tram stop to the Imperial War Museum North (and I forgot it was November!)...but anyway, apart from also taking in Urbis and Manchester City Art Gallery....(here are the students in the entrance hall).....we also considered the City of Manchester itself as a 'Museum'; rather sadly, my 'surprise' visit on the tour of Manchester as a city of Radicalism (the site of the Peterloo Massacre/Women's Suffrage/Birth of Marxism)..........(here's the commemorative
plaque marking the site of Peterloo)................was somewhat ironically usurped by the face of modern consumerism in the guise of a 20 foot high Santa on Manchester Town Hall, (and which the student's thought was the 'surprise'....which surprised me!)
......one could say, (if one adopted a Scrooge-like position) that one is a signifier of resistance (albeit now somewhat denuded of its power through its 'heritization'), the other a potent signifier of blissful apathy.....but then that would be just be churlish!

Anyway, 'holidays are coming, holidays are coming' (irony)
Mark