A few of interesting articles and posts floating around the internet today on the subject of cultural property and archaeology law:
- This morning, UNESCO unveiled plans for a museum to commemorate the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas. The Buddhas will not be rebuilt, but their niches will remain empty “as a testimony of the violence that occurred.” See my post from last week about their destruction 10 years ago.
- The Dutch government can’t find it’s art? Well, that’s the title of this article, sans the question mark, from Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Apparently the Dutch national cultural heritage services has identified 3,000 government-owned missing works of art, and over the past few years recovered only 200 of them. It is suspected that the works were loaned to other agencies for display in government offices, and were either stolen or given to other officials.
- If you’re in DC on March 21, you can attend the conference, The Cultural Property Implementation Act: Is it Working? put together by The Cultural Policy Research Institute. After 30 years of the CPIA, panelists will consider during this day-long seminar whether import restrictions are working as intended.
- SAFE posts on New Zealand’s progress restoring cultural monuments damaged in the recent earthquake.
- Derek Fincham considers whether cutting street art off a wall is akin to decontextualizing ancient stelae.
- Mark Durney covers the recent resignation of Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities minister, and in a later post the reasons Hawass gave for his resignation.