[CPProt.net] reports CPProt.net April 13, 2003

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April 13, 2003



Iraq: Relief and Recovery 
http://www.developmentgateway.org/node/481546/?

On the left hand side of this page you can select: 
 
 - Education & Culture 
  
 - Post-Conflict Reconstruction 

to find many updates on the present cultural situation in Iraq
 

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- Police looking for leads to solve theft from Pittsburg State art 
exhibit  

- Egypt: Internet site for stolen antiquities launched 

- History is being washed away at Taipei site

- Gallagher arrested in relation to alleged art theft 

- Iraq: Art Experts Fear Worst in the Plunder of a Museum

- The Art Newspaper; this week's top stories


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Police looking for leads to solve theft from Pittsburg State art 
exhibit 
By JOE NOGA 
Morning Sun Staff Writer 

The investigation into a recent art heist from an exhibit at Porter 
Hall on the Pittsburg State University campus sometime early 
Wednesday morning continues as local investigators contact 
surrounding cities and state for help.  "Will be contacting the 
Kansas Bureau of Investigation and other local law enforcement 
agencies in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma," said Butch Herring, 
assistant director of campus police. "What we are doing now is trying 
to get the word out about the theft and the descriptions of the 
paintings to area law enforcement and hopefully we will be able to 
recover them." The exhibit featured 55 pieces of art from two PSU 
artists, Kale Van Leeuwen, a senior fine arts major, and Michael 
Lasseter a graduate art student. There are 13 paintings missing, nine 
created by Van Leeuwen and four from Lasseter. Both men have removed 
their remaining art from the exhibit. "The bad thing is I had to take 
down my exhibition. Now I can't share it with anybody," Lasseter 
said. "This is my last semester. This was to be my crowning 
achievement, my big, solo graduate exhibition. It is just a bad 
ending to a whole lot of work."  "Just in the last two nights alone 
they had the showing of this artwork, so there were many, many, many 
people in there," Herring said. "It is really an impossibility to 
fingerprint an area like that. Basically, what we are hoping is that 
someone recognize the paintings and contact us. Herring said that 
they have started interviewing people about the night in question. 
"We've started interviewing people who were at Porter that night and 
interviewing people who were there in the morning," herring said. "We 
did interview one graduate assistant who was there until 2 a.m. and 
when she left she noticed that one of the paintings that was taken 
was hanging crooked on the wall and she straightened up. So we know 
they were there at 2 a.m."  

Herring said the custodial staff comes in at 6 a.m. but he said they 
weren't sure if the paintings were there or not. "But when Ms. Schick 
came in between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. she did notice the paintings were 
missing. So we are relatively sure that at some time in between, 
these items were removed." Herring said he isn't sure how the 
paintings were removed, but he said he does think that it was a theft 
of opportunity. "I think it is more a fact of during their showings 
many people asked what the paintings were worth," Herring said. "The 
fact is, somebody saw an opportunity and grabbed it."  

Van Leeuwen said that the value of his art was listed at 
approximately $2,500. "The bad thing about these paintings is that I 
can't replace them," Lasseter said. "I can't go out and paint another 
one like them, it doesn't work that way. One of them was of my 
parents' farms and I had a deep attachment to it. I have had offers 
to sell it but I wouldn't." Lasseter said his paintings were 
conservatively worth about $3,600 and he was offered nearly $1,000 
for the painting of his parents' farm.  

Anyone with information can contact the Pittsburg State University 
Police at 620-235-4624.  

To see photos of the stolen paintings go to 
www.morningsun.net/photogallery.  


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Internet site for stolen antiquities launched 


A new Internet site, displaying photos of antiquities illegally 
smuggled out of Egypt, has been designed by the Supreme Council of 
Antiquities (SCA).  

The website will also give detailed information about each item and 
is part of the Ministry of Culture's efforts to effect restoration of 
stolen antiquities, said Dr. Zahi Hawass, SCA Secretary-General, 
yesterday. He stated that a committee, led by Mohamed Abdul-Maksoud, 
general manager of the Lower Egypt Antiquities' Department, had been 
formed to handle legal procedures and take executive steps for the 
restoration of stolen items. The website will aid auction galleries 
to establish whether items offered for sale are genuine or illegal, 
enable them to inform Interpol of suspicious items and halt any 
sales, said Dr. Abdul-Maksoud. He mentioned that the International 
Governmental Committee to Restore Cultural Possessions to their 
Homelands, recommended at a meeting held at UNESCO headquarters in 
Paris last week, that all countries encountering this problem should 
set up such websites and link them to Interpol. Lists of smuggled 
antiquities are being prepared for submission to UNESCO, as well as 
the follow-up of auction house Internet sites offering antiquities 
for sale, to take legal procedures and halt sales of any suspected 
items, said SCA director general of restored antiquities, Ibrahim 
Abdul-Meguid.  

He added that another list will include antiquities, which have 
already been restored and these will also be displayed on the 
websites.  


(as soon as the URL is known we will inform Cpprot.net subscribers)


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Published on TaipeiTimes
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/04/12/201766
History is being washed away at Taipei site

By Chang Yun-Ping
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Apr 12, 2003,Page 4 

DPP Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chia-ching has demanded that the city's 
Cultural Affairs Bureau step up efforts to protect a prehistoric 
archeological site which now lies derelict on the grounds of the 
Municipal Children's Recreation Center (MCRC).  

"The Yuanshan Culture site, which holds the largest prehistoric shell 
mound in Taiwan, has been listed as a national historical heritage 
site," Hsu said yesterday. "However, the Cultural Affairs Bureau, 
which is responsible for managing the site, has left the site barren 
and untended," Hsu said. The city councilor demanded that the 
cultural affairs council move to protect the existing 2.7 hectare 
site, and coordinate with the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to 
determine the exact boundary of the site -- which includes the shell 
mound where inhabitants would discard the shells from shell fish they 
had eaten. To make her point, Hsu led officials from the Cultural 
Affairs Bureau, Education Bureau, and the recreation center to 
inspect the remaining relics. The prehistoric Yuanshan culture, which 
existed in Taiwan around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, was first 
discovered by a Japanese archaeologist in 1897. Although the site has 
been known about for some time, it was not until 1988 that the 
Ministry of the Interior officially listed the area as a first-degree 
national historical heritage site. Hu said that according to the 
Cultural Heritage Preservation Law, the local government is 
responsible for managing and maintaining historical heritage sites 
that lie within its jurisdiction. Therefore, Taipei's Cultural 
Affairs Bureau is responsible for looking after the site. "However, 
it has been two years since the former director of the Cultural 
Affairs Bureau, Lung Ying-tai, inspected the site and instructed the 
appropriate management work. Nothing has been done so far. The relics 
site is still deserted," Hsu complained.  

At the site, artifacts could be seen lying exposed on the ground, 
apparently being washed away by rain and wind. "The shell mound is 
especially vulnerable to damage from typhoons," Hsu said. However, 
the recreation center, which is responsible for managing the site on 
the city's behalf, is not equipped for such work. "The preservation 
work of the site needs professional experts to conduct appropriate 
protection work. The center is not really equipped with that 
professionalism to undertake the maintenance work,"said MCRC Director 
Chao Shan-pin.  

 
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Gallagher arrested in relation to alleged art theft 
12/04/2003 - 11:32:39 am 

Celebrity Irish chef Conrad Gallagher, who has been accused of 
stealing paintings from a Dublin hotel, has been arrested in New 
York.

Gallagher was appeared in Brooklyn federal court yesterday accused of 
stealing three paintings worth $50,000 (€47,000) from the hotel where 
he once ran a popular restaurant. He was remanded in custody pending 
an extradition hearing. No date was set. Gallagher’s lawyer, Doug 
Morris, declined to comment. Acting on recent information provided by 
Irish investigators, US marshals tracked down Gallagher and arrested 
him outside his Manhattan bar, called Traffic, said John Sheehan, 
spokesman for the US Marshals Service. Gallagher, 31, who has 
appeared on television and cooked for stars in Ireland, left the 
country last year on the eve of his trial. He has claimed he is the 
rightful owner of the paintings, according to press reports.  

If convicted, Gallagher faces up to 20 years in prison. 

http://breaking.examiner.ie/

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Art Experts Fear Worst in the Plunder of a Museum
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, a repository of treasures 
from civilization's first cities and early Islamic culture, could be 
a catastrophe for world cultural heritage, archaeologists and art 
experts said on Friday.  

"Baghdad is one of the great museums of the world, with irreplaceable 
material," said Dr. John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in 
Mesopotamian archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in 
Boston. Though he and other scholars of antiquities were alarmed by 
the reports of looting, they were not surprised. They said they 
feared the next cultural target could be the important museum in 
Mosul, a northern city that is also in turmoil. The Mosul museum 
holds many Assyrian artifacts from the nearby Nineveh ruins. 
Concerned archaeologists urged United States military leaders to take 
more forceful steps to protect Iraqi's cultural treasures and to 
restore control of them to the local Department of Antiquities. For 
weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted 
military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar 
pillage of the country's antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of 
ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur. 
Experts reminded the Defense Department that after the Persian Gulf 
war of 1991, 9 of Iraq's 13 regional museums were plundered. The 
Baghdad museum was spared then because the end of war had left the 
government still in power and policing the city. American 
archaeologists who studied the looting suspected that some of it was 
driven by the illicit trade in antiquities. At some remote and poorly 
guarded dig sites, Dr. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago 
wrote recently that illicit digging in most cases started as attempts 
simply to find something to sell to put food on the table. "This work 
soon grew to an industry," he said, "financed from abroad and 
engaging hundreds of diggers at some sites."  

The reported museum looting that began on Friday in Baghdad would be 
the war's first known plundering of Iraqi antiquities. Reacting to 
the report, Dr. Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan 
Museum of Art in New York City, said, "We can't conquer and then 
shirk further responsibility by allowing anarchy in the cities and 
allowing Iraq's ancient heritage to be pillaged." Dr. de Montebello 
complained of the apparent lack of effective policing by American 
troops. He said that he and other museum officials and archaeologists 
had already held meetings to explore what must be done "to help the 
Baghdad museum and Iraqi's antiquities authorities to restore 
themselves." By chance, the damage to the Baghdad museum came as the 
Metropolitan was preparing a major new exhibition, "Art of the First 
Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the 
Indus." It is to open May 8. About 400 rare works of art will be 
displayed, many of them from Iraq, though no works from the Baghdad 
museum were available. More than 230 scholars of ancient Mesopotamian 
history from 25 countries have signed a petition to be delivered to 
the United Nations on Monday. Drafted by researchers at Yale and 
Oxford Universities, the petition urges military leaders and postwar 
administrators of Iraq to safeguard cultural artifacts "for the 
future of the Iraqi people and for the world." American 
archaeologists said that they had lost contact with their Iraqi 
colleagues in recent weeks. The last they had heard was that several 
antiquities officials and researchers had barricaded themselves in 
the Baghdad museum. They had hidden some of the most precious 
artifacts elsewhere, and protected others with sandbags.  

At last report, just before the outbreak of war on March 21, Dr. 
Russell said that Dr. Donny George, the research director of 
antiquities who is known for his heft, was seen to be thin and 
exhausted from the stress of preparing to defend the museum. Of the 
several thousand artifacts at the museum, Dr. Russell said some of 
his favorites were the stone birds from Nemrik, north of Mosul. The 
site, investigated in the last decade, is one of the world's first 
villages, from about 8,000 B.C. The museum's collection includes a 
cult vase from Uruk decorated with some of the earliest narrative 
pictures from the Sumerian culture. The pictures show fields and 
flocks and people making offerings to the goddess Inanna, the 
Sumerian version of Ishtar.  

"That's a beautiful, important piece," Dr. Russell said.

http://www.nytimes.com/


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The Art Newspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com

This week's top stories:

US ARTS FUNDING IN CRISIS

NEW YORK. State governors across the US are proposing deficit-
reducing arts cuts of unprecedented severity. New Jersey Governor 
James E McGreevey’s proposed budget would trim $32 million from the 
State’s $5-billion shortfall by eliminating the Council on the Arts 
and the Historical Commission completely, along with a trust for 
struggling arts groups. This just a few months after the governor 
vowed to increase arts funding: he and his family recently posed for 
a “Discover Jersey Arts” marketing campaign ad. 
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10977  

SINGAPORE FULFILLS ITS CULTURAL PROMISE

SINGAPORE. Singaporeans are painfully aware of their international 
image and stung by descriptions of their island  as boring and, of 
their government as overly intrusive. Who, after all, has not heard 
of Singapore’s anti-spitting law? The new branch of the Asian 
Civilisations Museum (ACM), which opened last month, is part of a 
massive government arts programme launched 10 years ago partly to 
counter these claims, but mainly to establish the squeaky-clean 
island as a  credible centre for the arts. 
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10975  

WHEN CULTURES CLASH

.BEATING AROUND THE BUSH 

Like everyone else, artists have watched the war. Some have created 
protest actions even though polls have shown that the majority of the 
US public could not give a damn what actors, writers and artists 
think about the war. Not being of this opinion, The Art Newspaper 
offers a sampling of what prominent people in the art world and 
artists think about the war in Iraq and the current political climate 
in the US. 
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10972  

GONE, BUT FAR FROM FORGOTTEN

The stories of 24 major works of art that have disappeared, told by 
Gert-Rudolf Flick in his new book 'Missing masterpieces' 
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10971  

MALAGA: MORE THAN JUST BEACH MADRID. Probably best known as the 
arrival point for millions of tourists to the Costa del Sol, Malaga 
has been something of a cultural backwater until very recently. 
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10970  

Anna Somers Cocks, Editor
contact at theartnewspaper.com

The Art Newspaper
70 South Lambeth Road London SW8 1RL UK
tel +44(0)207 735 3331 fax +44(0)207 735 3332
http://81.112.115.148


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