Reposted from the Independent

A tourist bus was hit by an explosion near the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, according to security sources.

At least 16 people were injured in the blast on the road outside the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo on Sunday.

The bus was carrying 28 South African tourists from the airport to the pyramids. Several Egyptians in nearby vehicles were also injured by broken glass.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack but Egyptian security forces have been waging a counter-insurgency campaign against Islamist militants in the north of the Sinai Peninsula.

Mohamed el-Mandouh, who witnessed the blast, said he heard a “very loud explosion” while sitting in traffic nearby.

Images showing a damaged bus with its windows blown out and what looked to be injured tourists, some covered in blood, have been circulated on social media.

South Africa’s foreign ministry said in a statement that three of its citizens were injured and will remain in hospital. The other 25 passengers will return home on Monday morning, it claimed.

The blast happened around 50 metres from the outer fence of the new museum, and more than 400 metres from the main building, according to the Antiquities Ministry.

Egypt’s tourist industry has been recovering in recent years after visitor numbers dropped in the wake of a 2011 uprising and the 2015 bombing of a Russian passenger jet.

The museum, which will display some of the country’s top antiquities on a site adjoining the world-famous Giza pyramids, is due to open next year. 

In December, three Vietnamese tourists and an Egyptian guide were killed and at least 10 others injured when a roadside bomb hit their tour bus less than 2.5 miles from the Giza pyramids.

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Reposted from NPR

The Louvre was shuttered on Monday, leaving hordes of tourists outside amid its famous glass pyramids. The reason? The Paris museum's security and reception staff were on strike, protesting "unprecedented deterioration of conditions" amid record crowds.

The museum, located in a former royal palace on the city's Right Bank, attracted a record 10.2 million visitors last year – a 25% increase over the year before. "No other museum in the world has ever equaled this figure," the museum trumpeted in January.

But workers say both visitors and staff are suffering from such massive popularity.

"The Louvre is suffocating," the Sud Culture Solidaires Union said in a statement Sunday. "While the public has increased by more than 20% since 2009, the palace has not grown. ... Today the situation is untenable."

Amid rising crowds from 2009 to 2018, staff headcount declined in that period from 2,161 to 2,005, according to the union.

American visitors to the museum on Monday posted photos of the disappointed queues outside. "Well this is great," tweeted one Californian. "Glad I got to the Louvre early."

The museum is offering refunds to those who bought tickets for the day.

The union cites several problems it says are caused by overcrowded conditions at the museum: an aggressive and impatient public, jostling crowds and inadequate emergency evacuation measures.

"What to say about visiting conditions when people are confronted with noise, trampling, crowds, extreme fatigue and the total inadequacy of museum facilities at such a high volume of visitors?" the union said in the statement. "The Louvre does not have the means of its ambitions."

The Louvre is closed today, as it is customarily on Tuesdays. A notice on its website said the museum would open late on Wednesday after "a general meeting attended by members of the Musée du Louvre's Reception and Security staff." It warned that large numbers of visitors are expected in the coming days, and recommended buying tickets online.

Pierre Zinenberg, a Louvre employee and union representative, told the Associated Press that the outcome of Wednesday's meeting would determine whether the museum would re-open that day, or whether the strike would continue.

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Reposted from The Washington Post

The field trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was supposed to be a reward for good grades and excellent behavior.

Instead, chaperones say, students from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy Charter Public School in Dorchester, Mass., left in tears last week after they were subjected to racial profiling from museum employees and offensive comments from visitors.

On Friday, the museum again apologized to the students and the middle school, where the majority of students are black or Latino. The museum said in a statement Friday that, following an investigation, it had banned visitors accused of making racist comments and is retraining staff and security.

“These young people left the Museum feeling disrespected, harassed and targeted because of the color of their skin,” said the museum’s director, Matthew Teitelbaum. “And that is unacceptable.”

The 26 seventh-graders who went on the school trip are students of color, according to school officials, and the allegations have prompted a larger conversation about how museums and other elite cultural institutions can be uncomfortable spaces for people of color.

Security guards closely shadowed the seventh-graders throughout their visit and followed them from one gallery to another, Marvelyne Lamy, an English language arts teacher at the charter school, told local media outlets. She and her students noticed that their group seemed to be subject to more scrutiny than predominantly white school groups that were touring the museum at the same time.

“We were instructed not to touch any of the artifacts in the museum, yet the white students there touched the displays several times while security looked on without saying anything,” Lamy wrote on Monday in a Facebook post, where she first detailed her frustrations with the museum. “The minute one of our students followed suit, the security guards would yell at them that they should not touch exhibits.”

A staff member who was explaining the museum’s rules allegedly told the group, “No food, no drink, no watermelon.” Lamy told the Globe that she did not hear the comment herself, but students who were upset by the apparent reference to a well-known racist trope told her about it. One 13-year-old told the Globe that the remark left her feeling angry, uncomfortable and disrespected.

The middle-schoolers also reported hearing disparaging remarks from other museum visitors. One student told Lamy that she had been dancing to music played as part of an exhibit when a museumgoer said, “It’s a shame that she is not learning and instead stripping.” Another seventh-grade teacher at the school, Taliana Jeune, described the remark differently, telling WCVB that the student had been warned, “I hope you’re paying attention so that you don’t become a stripper.'”

The remark about stripping was the last straw, Lamy wrote on Facebook, and told the seventh-graders that they were leaving right away. As they were making their way out of the museum, some students paused by the entrance to an African art exhibit. Lamy said a woman walked by and commented, “Never mind, there’s f---ing black kids in the way.”

Lamy said she never planned to set foot in the museum again.

“We reported all these incidents to the staff at the MFA, and they just looked on with pity,” she wrote on Facebook. “They took our names and filed a report. Their only solution, they will give us tickets to come back and have a ‘better’ experience. We did not even receive an apology.” 

To some critics, the middle-schoolers’ experience demonstrated why the MFA and other prestigious cultural institutions remain stubbornly white. Racism, wrote Globe opinion columnist Renée Graham, “compels us to self-segregate, to do it to ourselves before it can be done to us. And we tick off the places we won’t go — certain ballparks, restaurants, theaters, symphony halls, hospitals and stores. And museums.” 

The museum has made a concerted effort to attract a more diverse audience in recent years. In 2015, the museum found that nearly 80 percent of people who visited were white, which led to targeted outreach and initiatives aimed at making the museum more inclusive. Two years later, Globe reporters who visited on a Saturday found that, out of roughly 3,000 guests, only about 4 percent were black.

On Wednesday, nearly a week after the field trip, top museum officials apologized in an open letter that acknowledged that the students had “encountered a range of challenging and unacceptable experiences that made them feel unwelcome.” 

On Friday, the museum revealed the conclusions of its investigation, which included re-creating the students’ three-hour visit from security footage and speaking to dozens of people.

It said it could not “definitively confirm or deny” that students were told “no food, no drink, no watermelon,” saying a staff member recalled saying “no food, no drink and no water bottles” were allowed. Though the museum typically allows guests to carry closed water bottles, school groups are advised that no drinks are allowed in the galleries.

The museum also said security guards’ rotations may have unintentionally appeared to the students as if they were being followed, but added, “It is unacceptable that they felt racially profiled, targeted and harassed.”

Lastly, the museum said its investigation found that other visitors made racist comments to the students, which led to the revocation of their membership and their banning from the museum.

The museum vowed to “adapt security procedures . . . to make sure all people feel welcome,” provide additional training to employees that work with visitors and continue mandatory unconscious bias training for all staff members.

Teitelbaum has asked to meet with students at the school next week.

“This is a fundamental problem that we will address as an institution, both with immediate steps and long-term commitments,” Teitelbaum said in the statement. “I am deeply saddened that we’ve taken something away from these students that they will never get back.”

The experience ended up teaching the seventh-graders “an unfortunate lesson,” Arturo J. Forrest, Davis Leadership Academy’s principal, told the Globe.

“This was a strong group of students that went, they excelled academically,” he said. “The shock of it for them was, ‘We are the top and we carry ourselves the right way as leaders.’ You know, it was very eye-opening for them.

Lamy agreed.

“I had to tell them, you know, as a black or brown person, you have to work 10 times harder,” she told reporters on Thursday. “Unfortunately, that’s the world that we live in.”

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Reposted from Securitas Security Services, USA, Inc.

We live in a digital world where a growing threat from cyber thieves exists. In preparing for the holiday season, we should acknowledge our vulnerability to identity theft, as evidenced by the numerous data breaches making headlines. Understanding and awareness can mean the difference between proactively preventing a crime or reactively spending months, if not years, repairing the damage.

What Is Identity Theft?

The United States government defines identity theft as personal information that is stolen and used without permission for some form of gain (Federal Trade Commission). There are a myriad of methods thieves employ to gain access to your personal information and data. Criminals can take out a loan or credit card in your name, without you being aware, using stolen personal data. Immediate repercussions can include a decline in your credit score, calls from debt collectors, collection notices, money missing from bank accounts, false charges on your credit card and transactions declined for accounts associated with your name.

Protect Yourself

The best defense is to be proactive. Like the Securitas value of Vigilance, one must actively protect personal information from would-be thieves. The U.S. Department of Justice recommends employing a ‘need to know’ attitude when it comes to your personal information. First and foremost, do not share your social security number unless absolutely necessary. Next, carefully review monthly statements for any possible errors or mistakes. Shred all personal papers and records before throwing them away. Do not use the same password for multiple sites; vary your passwords for an added layer of protection. Obtain a copy of your credit report, one from each of the three main credit reporting agencies. You have the legal right to a free report once a year. Carefully review all the information, and if there are any unauthorized or incorrect pieces of information, immediately dispute it with the credit agency. You can also subscribe to a credit monitoring service that will provide immediate notification of any associated changes with your credit score. Finally, if you are going to be away from home for an extended period of time, and a friend or neighbor can’t collect your mail, request a mail hold through the U.S. Postal Service until you return. This will help prevent anyone from rummaging through your mailbox while you are away.

What If Your Identity Is Compromised?

If you become a victim of identity theft, there are several immediate actions that will help mitigate the damage. The process is time-consuming, and some steps have a monetary cost, but it is necessary to salvage the situation and protect yourself. If your identity is compromised, do all of the following:

• Call one of the three major credit reporting agencies and place a fraud alert on your credit report. By law they must notify the other two agencies to do the same. An initial fraud alert is good for 90 days, but can be extended for up to seven years, with law enforcement documentation.

• Order all three credit reports and review all information associated with your credit. Notify the respective agency of errors. Note: credit reports and scores vary slightly between the three major credit reporting agencies, hence the need to order all three.

• File an Identity Theft Report through the Federal Trade Commission. This will allow you to get fraudulent information removed from your credit report and stop any debt collections associated with illegal accounts.

• File your Identity Theft Report with the local FBI or U.S. Secret Service field office. Obtain a copy of the completed report for your records. The federal law enforcement agency will open a file and begin an investigation into the crime.

• Contact the Social Security Administration if you suspect that your Social Security number has been compromised or used in the identity theft.

• Contact all your financial institutions to verify that your accounts have not been compromised and for them to track any and all future transactions associated with those accounts.

• If you suspect that a thief has submitted a change of address form with the U.S. Post Office contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

• Finally, contact the Internal Revenue Service if you believe that the identity theft was associated with a tax filing. The ease of submitting a digital tax return has made this a growing crime.

Secure Your Information

A simple way to protect yourself is by being aware of what personal information is being used and shared. Be extremely careful to whom you provide personal information, whether over the phone, through email, or on a website. If you are the one who has initiated the contact, then most times you will be protected. Be alert when you are contacted by someone requesting information. If in doubt, do NOT provide it. If you receive a phone call, offer to call them back, but do NOT use the number they provide. Use the number from a paper statement or search online to verify the contact information of any organization. Customer service representatives will be able to tell you if they have tried to contact you with a request for information.

The Better Business Bureau can verify the legitimacy of any business, brand, or charity.

Before discarding cell phones, tablets, or personal computers, erase all information and reset the systems to the original factory settings. Only submit information online when the ‘lock’ icon is in the browser address bar. Also, look for sites with web addresses beginning with ‘https.’ The ‘s’ stands for secure. If it is not present, transmitted information is not protected. Never leave your passwords on a sheet of paper that can be easily found. Finally, be careful about sharing information on social media sites. Tech savvy individuals can piece together your personal information with your indirect help.

For more information on this and other security related topics, visit the Securitas Safety Awareness Knowledge Center at: http://www.securitasinc.com/en/knowledge-center/security-and-safety-awareness-tips

Reposted from El Pais

Four days before a fire ravaged Notre-Dame cathedral on April 15, the Prado Museum hired a specialist in heritage risk prevention to draft a protection plan for the museum’s art collections.

Estrella Sanz Domínguez, who teaches restoration at Complutense University’s School of Fine Arts in Madrid, is an expert in risk management and emergency plans. She now has 22 months to identify potential risks to the world-famous museum, such as fires, theft or terrorist attacks, and to come up with “a massive evacuation plan” for the artwork. The museum has invested €55,600 in the project.

The plan must establish priorities and state which artworks should be saved first in the event of an emergency. Sanz will have to produce a list of the 250 most important pieces, and create internal emergency teams made up of various employees, from security guards to restorers, to take charge of gems like Velázquez’s Las Meninas or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

For each of the 250 priority works, there will be a file containing essential information about how to proceed with the evacuation, the degree of difficulty, and the vulnerability of the work in question. A person will be appointed to head the evacuation, and a destination point established. As for the art that cannot be taken out of the Prado, the museum will consider special on-site measures.

Karina Marotta, the conservation coordinator at the landmark gallery, said that the Prado already has a general emergency plan in place, but that this is something that “is always being tweaked.”

Protecting the collections of Spain’s art museums did not become a public concern until the Lorca earthquake of 2011. After that, the Culture Ministry issued orders to all the relevant agencies and the Prado drafted basic emergency guidelines. But there was only a detailed evacuation plan for temporary exhibits, as this was a demand made by the owners of the art on loan. No large-scale evacuation plan existed for the permanent collection.

Estrella Sanz was hired “because the museum does not have technicians who are sufficiently specialized to draft such a plan,” according to Marotta.

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Reposted from The Mandarin

It’s often said staff are the weak point in an organisation’s cyber security, with a single click on a dodgy link enough to undercut expensive infrastructure.

It turns out building security suffers from similar problems.

In a slightly unusual step, Victorian Auditor General Andrew Greaves hired a specialist security consultant to go undercover and try to get into offices belonging to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice and Community Safety — and they did.

The problem was not physical infrastructure, which was up to the job, but staff themselves. Although some did question the outsiders and ask for identification, the testers managed to get in nonetheless.

“While all tested sites have a range of physical security measures that control unauthorised access to some extent, security controls were bypassed and we accessed areas not permitted to the public,” says the audit published on Wednesday.

“This enabled access to information and physical assets. We successfully accessed these sites because staff did not understand their role in maintaining physical security, or did not comply with established processes, allowing our testers access.”

In one case, testers managed to get hold of the master keys for a multi-tenant building. In another, “highly confidential information was found unsecured, outside of the immediate office area”.

The auditor blames human error and “a weak security culture”.

“This weak security culture among government staff is a significant and present risk that must be urgently addressed.”

The auditor’s testers also observed several breaches and risks of a more moderate nature:

• Confidential information within the office space was not adequately secured or locked in lockers, tambours or filing cabinets.
• Staff did not always adhere to the clear desk policy, nor was it monitored or enforced by the department.
• There is not a strong practice of staff questioning or challenging unfamiliar or suspicious people in the office space.
• Staff were not aware or did not challenge those who tailgated them.
• The period of time that accessible gates remain open, and their use by able-bodied people for convenience.
• Workstations were often unlocked when unattended and passwords were left nearby on sticky notes.
• Lax processes for visitor or contractor sign in and approval.

In 2018, DHHS had the most security incidents reported to the Shared Service Provider, a business unit in Treasury which helps agencies manage security — but the auditor notes this is probably because it has more security guards, and is therefore able to detect more incidents.

“It is almost certain that incidents are occurring within the office accommodation of the other government agencies,” says VAGO.

The problems found by the auditor are not helped by the fact that there is no statewide oversight or coordination of protective security.

“At present, there is no clear, strategic leader for policy, oversight and coordination of the three domains of protective security across government agencies. This precludes the better integration and coordination of protective security arrangements,” says VAGO.

The departments concerned have some way to go on security policies too.

“At the agency level, DJCS has made positive steps towards developing department-wide policies and procedures for security management. DHHS, however, has not developed its security policies and procedures, making it more vulnerable to unauthorised access.”

The auditor wants improvements in incident reporting and recommends Treasury, Premier and Cabinet and Justice work together to develop “a statewide principle-based physical security policy, with clear accountabilities for government agencies”.

All 12 recommendations have been agreed to by relevant agencies.

Justice Secretary Rebecca Falkingham said the department “is committed to promoting a strong security culture and good governance and undertaking regular physical security planning and risk assessment as recommended by the report.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kym Peake wrote that DHHS “is already developing a security management governance structure to incorporate executive oversight and a physical security assessment model to support regular physical security and risk assessments at all office accommodation sites.”

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Reposted from The Local France

On Monday evening, the French Senate approved the government's Notre-Dame restoration bill - but added a clause that it must be restored to the state it was before the blaze, striking a blow to the government which had launched an international architecture competition to debate ideas on the restoration.

The subject of the rebuilding of the cathedral - which was left badly damaged after fire tore through the roof and destroyed the spire on April 15 - has become a fraught battleground between traditionalists who want an exact restoration and others who favour a more imaginative take.

Some of the suggestions have included a rooftop garden, an 'endless spire' of light and a swimming pool on top of the building.

The Senate has now approved the restoration bill already passed by the French parliament to allow work on the structure to be completed in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024 - but requires that the restoration be faithful to the “last known visual state” of the cathedral, in an attempt to check the government, which has launched an international architectural competition soliciting designs for renovation.

The question of whether Notre-Dame will be restored identically has become a political battleground. French president Emmanuel Macron has called for “an inventive reconstruction”, while Paris' Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo favors an identical restoration and called herself “conservative” on the subject.

Senators also removed a controversial clause from the law which would give the government the power to override regulations on planning, environmental and heritage protection and public tenders. Many members of the Senate, dominated by the right-wing opposition, have been especially critical of President’s Macron’s promise to finish reconstruction within five years.

The law would enable the government to create an établissement public à caractère administratif (EPA), or public project, to oversee the reconstruction project. This EPA would itself be placed under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, currently directed by Franck Riester.

Another minor modification is the backdating of a proposed tax break for those who have made donations for the cathedral’s reconstruction.

The bill approved by the Assemblée nationale outlines a national subscription project to be put in place in order to manage funds collected, making donations made from April 16th through December 31st eligible for a deduction of 75 percent, up to €1,000. The Senate has pushed the beginning of this period back to April 15th, so that those who made the earliest donations will not be penalised. 

Because of the changes imposed, the bill cannot now pass directly in to law, so the Senate and the Assemblée nationale will now attempt to come to an agreement on a version of the bill that will become law.

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Reposted from Insurance Business America

Museums don’t just have eight mischievous female criminals to fear these days, as hackers can prey on cultural institutions from a great distance and do just as much damage. However, it’s not the million-dollar artwork hanging on the walls and sitting behind glass cases that’s most threatened when cybercriminals attack.

“Their biggest concern is the personal information of their donors,” said Richard Mercado (pictured), vice president of commercial insurance for Huntington T. Block, an operating unit of Aon plc. He also added that many museums do online marketing and sales, which puts credit card information at risk. “Those are really what they’re most concerned about, and how that would impact their business if there was a cyberattack on their systems. Part of that is the public image, and if important confidential information of their clients, especially donors, is exposed.”

Public relations are a huge concern, considering that museums often need private funds to keep their institutions up and running.

“Museums primarily rely on huge donors,” said Mercado. “Some of the largest museums rely a lot on private donations, although some do get money from the government. That is definitely an area of most concern to them if they are hacked, [and] the consequence of donors not having as much confidence in the museum, [which] ultimately would drop donations for the institutions.”

With cybercrime losses on the rise, risk managers at museums are paying more attention to the evolving risk and how to prepare for it, should an incident throw their networks into turmoil and put donor data at risk. Many museums today have chief information officers or in-house IT managers who oversee the safeguarding of their systems.

“They know that it’s not really a matter of whether they will be attacked, but it’s more of when they might be attacked and how catastrophic it might be if they do not contain it or prevent it,” explained Mercado.

While there haven’t been any major instances of museums being hacked yet, Mercado has seen threats of social engineering, where a cybercriminal has attempted to dupe a museum director or another officer in the organization to release funds via an email where they impersonate another higher-ranking employee.

“From a social engineering perspective, one of the best things that everybody has learned to do is call back. If you get an email from supposedly the president of the museum or the director of the museum instructing you to wire $50,000 somewhere to Africa, the best thing to do is just call up the person wherever they might be and ask if they actually sent this order or not,” explained Mercado. “Museums are also becoming more wary and more careful if they don’t need social security or information of an individual or their donors. They are really trying to minimize storing and even obtaining confidential information if they don’t have to.”

he largest museums are already making their systems more secure, whereas mid-sized and smaller museums, sometimes because of limited resources, may not have all the necessary tools to protect themselves, and those are the ones that usually do not think that they are vulnerable, according to Mercado.

Similarly, crafting a cyber insurance policy for a museum also depends on the size of the institution.

“Museums with operating budgets of less than $10 million are much easier to underwrite in the sense that we can easily provide those coverages under their commercial package policy as an additional coverage,” said Mercado. “But for the larger museums, with $10 million or $50 million and above of operating budget, normally the underwriters really want to write them separately and more expensively, because of the volume of data and records that might be exposed.”

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Reposted from Cultural Property News

In a recent longform article for The Art Newspaper, Barbara Pollack highlighted the extraordinary rise in public protests taking place at America’s leading art museums. These are not reactions to polemical new artists, or even a revival of the playful ‘Renoir Sucks’ protests of yesteryear. In most cases, the art and artifacts on display in these museums were entirely tangential to the protesters’ ire. The protesters’ grievances with the museums vary, from contributing to gentrification to accepting donations from the Sackler family, a branch of which is heavily implicated in the American opioid crisis. The targeted museums have not just been passive sites for protest; some museum staffers have added their own voices to the outcry. The clearest case of this participation took place at the Whitney Biennial, at which protesters gathered repeatedly to call for the removal of Warren B. Kanders’ from the museum’s board. Members of the Whitney staff, as well as the majority of artists showing at the Biennial, have joined in the call for Kanders’ removal. Several of the public protests took place during an exhibition that featured artwork highlighting crowd-suppression by security forces using tear-gas canisters manufactured by a subsidiary of Kanders’ own Safariland Group.

The Whitney is not the only art museum using its public platform to combat ongoing perceived political and social injustices. Apart from providing a venue for protest, many museums are looking inward, seeking ways to reform their collections, programming, and staff, to better serve a diverse (and outspoken) audience. Modern art museums in particular are now deliberately adding works by non-male and non-white artists to their permanent collections and temporary shows.

In parallel with the wide range of exhibitions of art by a diverse cast of contemporary artists, historical museums in major cities are increasingly pursuing programs celebrating the history of world art and indigenous cultures. The British Museum currently features an exhibition, Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, which pairs artifacts collected by Cook on his exploratory voyages with artwork by contemporary Pacific artists reflecting on their history. The exhibition was planned to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage but focuses not on the experiences of the British explorers but on the long-term effects of their reports on perceptions of the Pacific Islanders. The legacy of Cook’s voyage and the traditional role he has been given in Australia as “discoverer of the continent” is the subject of polarizing debate there. Cook’s methods of acquiring some of the exceptionally rare objects in the exhibition are also controversial and raise broader questions about where and by whom such objects should be held, among them a Tahitian formal costume which he collected, one of very few still in existence.

Putting on exhibitions of art and artifacts from across the world is nothing new for Western art museums, but what has changed is the attitude taken by the host institutions to the artworks on display.  Increasingly, there are attempts to acknowledge the artworks as part of a living tradition, and recognize them as the heritage of peoples who are among the intended beneficiaries of the show. During their recent Oceania exhibition, the Royal Academy offered all citizens of New Zealand and Pacific Islanders free admission, while a notice on the main exhibition page informed all visitors of the cultural importance and sensitivity of the artifacts on display: ‘This exhibition includes many objects that Pacific Islanders consider living treasures. Some may pay their respects and make offerings through the duration of the exhibition.”

Public displays of sacred (and secular) cultural property from indigenous groups are never uncontroversial or universally accepted, but the Oceania exhibition received strong positive responses from British and Islander reviewers alike, and was welcomed by members of the Pacific community. Pacific Islanders were invited to bless the exhibition spaces before they opened, in a ceremony which included dancers in traditional dress progressing through the London street and into the RA’s gallery space.

These new exhibitions of art and material culture from specific ethnic or cultural groups are also increasingly curated by representatives of those groups. This has become a priority, to the degree that curator Brian Just of the Art Institute of Chicago recently made the determination to postpone an exhibition of Mimbres pottery until a Native co-curator for the show was given a consultative role.

The British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and similar institutions are better able to pursue a more diverse exhibition program than smaller regional museums. These major institutions have long-established collections of historical art and artifacts from across the globe – another reason why they are criticized for ‘hoarding’- but their vast resources are what enables them to build comprehensive exhibitions in the first place. Any voids in their collections can be temporarily supplied through loans facilitated by their prestigious reputations and their long-established relationships with fellow museums and private collectors. For less well-endowed ethnographic and art historical museums, diversifying their collections is an even greater challenge than diversifying their staff. Museum-quality objects are simply harder to attain, and public attention and private funds are more often directed to contemporary art than to historic collections.

Even so, older artworks continue to play a powerful role in contemporary political discourse. The impact that museums of art and culture will have in future depends greatly upon who has access to historic artworks, and what facilities museums have to educate their publics about the achievements of all cultures, not just Western traditions.

Berlin recently witnessed a poignant illustration of the power of art, and the importance of museum’s political attitudes towards their own collections and how they are displayed. In April 2019, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, discovered that images of one of their artworks, Slave Market, by French Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, had been appropriated for use in an anti-immigration campaign by the far-right party Alternative for Germany. The AfD, as it is known, is the third largest political group in Germany, having risen to prominence since its founding six years ago on a platform which includes a hardline anti-immigration stance. In recent years, the party and its members have been charged with racism, anti-feminism, homophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. The aptness of Gérôme’s painting for appropriation by an organization hoping to promote fear and distrust of Syrian, North African, and Turkish migrants in Germany is undeniable. Slave Market depicts a light-skinned, nude woman, surrounded by three darker-skinned men in Ottoman dress, one of whom has inserted his fingers into her mouth, to check the condition of her teeth. Gérome’s work, as art historian Linda Nochlin has observed, projects European sexual fantasies and racial stereotypes onto a depiction of the Middle Eastern slave trade whose accuracy is, at best, dubious.

Unwilling to have their art collection politicized in this way, the Clark immediately submitted a letter to the AfD, calling on the party to cease all use of the image for its public campaign. Despite the Clark’s protest, the AfD has declined to take down any of their posters and will continue to use Gérôme’s painting to promote their views on immigration. Unfortunately, as Oliver Meslay, director of the museum, has stated, they have no options for controlling the use of the painting’s image “other than to appeal to civility on the part of the AfD Berlin.” Bereft of the power to prevent similar distorting appropriations of art, both long-past and recent, museums can fight back only by doing what they have always done: help their visitors better understand the histories of their own and other cultures, through the display of art and artifacts.

The very same international immigration, which the AfD and like-minded right-wing parties in Europe and America oppose, has contributed to the multiculturalism of modern cities across Europe and America. These diverse populations are being served by local art and history museums who are coming to recognize their responsibility to tell the stories and celebrate the heritages of all their communities. This is not just an obligation but an opportunity – a museum that speaks to a wider audience will have more visitors and higher visibility, leading to more vocal public support, donations, loans, and funding. Yet smaller regional museums, and museums in countries without a colonial history, are all at a disadvantage when attempting to develop collections of cultural artifacts that reflect the ethnic and cultural makeup of their 21st century communities.

In today’s increasingly restricted and polemical art market, these institutions will find it difficult to expand their holdings to reflect new goals for diversity. Relentless public scrutiny makes the acquisition of any kind of foreign cultural property very risky for museums, even in cases involving legitimately excavated artifacts or legally purchased antiques that left their source countries long before national-ownership laws were enacted. Museums are public institutions, and dependent on popular goodwill for the patronage that keeps them alive. Newspapers hungry for content to fill the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and the constant, critical conversation on social media, have made museums wary of controversy of any kind. Meanwhile, memoranda of understanding and blanket export bans dash the collection-building dreams of diversity-conscious curators.

If the museums of the future are to fulfill their function as educational institutions and as shared spaces that represent the backgrounds and heritage of all their community members, a new system for the circulation of art needs to be put into place. Perhaps artworks need to be issued with passports of their own, so that cultural property can retain its ties to its homeland while traveling around the world, just as people do.

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Reposted from Forward

A note reading “Hitler is coming” was found on a billboard designed for comments by visitors to the Brooklyn Jewish Children’s Museum.

Police are investigating the note, left Thursday, as a hate crime, a spokesperson told the New York Post.

Visitors alerted police to the anti-Semitic note at the Crown Heights museum. The city’s hate-crime task force took over the investigation, authorities said.

Mordechai Lightstone, a Chabad rabbi, wrote on Twitter: “This is just awful. An interactive sign in front of the Jewish Children’s Museum in Crown Heights asking people how they would transform the world was defaced with Antisemitic graffiti!”

Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement about the incident: “We have zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, discrimination or hate of any kind in New York, and no person should ever feel threatened because of their religious beliefs.”

He has ordered the state police to assist the NYPD in their investigation.

The museum was one of many Jewish institutions targeted in a wave of fake bomb threats in 2017 that were found to have been called in by an Israeli teenager.

The note came soon after two anti-Semitic incidents in Crown Heights. On Wednesday, two men approached an Orthodox Jewish woman sitting on a bench and said “Hail Hitler” to her, and tried to follow her and harass her as she ran away. Earlier this week, a 27-year-old Orthodox man was slapped in the back of the head by a man riding by on a bike.

Crown Heights has seen a spike over the past year and a half in anti-Semitic incidents, exposing racial tensions in the neighborhood, which is majority black but has a large Hasidic Orthodox population, primarily from the Chabad group. The incidents, which many residents have said are broadly underreported, run the gamut from verbal harassment to violent assaults.

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