facility:the louvre

Museums Cut Ties With Sacklers as Outrage Over Opioid Crisis Grows - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/arts/design/sackler-museums-donations-oxycontin.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/03/25/arts/25SACKLER1/merlin_150532329_e134dc51-842c-4aae-b44e-9941820f5848-facebookJumbo.jpg

In Paris, at the Louvre, lovers of Persian art knew there was only one place to go: the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities. Want to find the long line for the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Head for the soaring, glass-walled Sackler Wing.

For decades, the Sackler family has generously supported museums worldwide, not to mention numerous medical and educational institutions including Columbia University, where there is a Sackler Institute, and Oxford, where there is a Sackler Library.

But now some favorite Sackler charities are reconsidering whether they want the money at all, and several have already rejected any future gifts, concluding that some family members’ ties to the opioid crisis outweighed the benefits of their six- and sometimes seven-figure checks.

In a remarkable rebuke to one of the world’s most prominent philanthropic dynasties, the prestigious Tate museums in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, where a Sackler sat on the board for many years, decided in the last week that they would no longer accept gifts from their longtime Sackler benefactors. Britain’s National Portrait Gallery announced it had jointly decided with the Sackler Trust to cancel a planned $1.3 million donation, and an article in The Art Newspaper disclosed that a museum in South London had returned a family donation last year.

On Monday, as the embarrassment grew with every new announcement, a Sackler trust and a family foundation in Britain issued statements saying they would suspend further philanthropy for the moment.

“The current press attention that these legal cases in the United States is generating has created immense pressure on the scientific, medical, educational and arts institutions here in the U.K., large and small, that I am so proud to support,” Theresa Sackler, the chair of the Sackler Trust, said in a statement. “This attention is distracting them from the important work that they do.”

The Guggenheim’s move was perhaps the most surprising, and not just because it was the first American institution known to cut ties with its Sackler supporters.

Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a son of Mortimer Sackler, sat on the Guggenheim’s board for nearly 20 years and the family gave the museum $9 million between 1995 and 2015, including $7 million to establish and support the Sackler Center for Arts Education.

The Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum had been the scene of protests related to the Sacklers. One last month, led by the photographer Nan Goldin, who overcame an OxyContin addiction, involved dropping thousands of slips of white paper from the iconic gallery spiral into its rotunda, a reference to a court document that quoted Richard Sackler, who ran Purdue Pharma, heralding a “blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”

Last Thursday, the Guggenheim, like other American museums, stated simply that “no contributions from the Sackler family have been received since 2015 and no additional gifts are planned.”

But a day later, amid more articles about British museums rejecting Sackler money, the Guggenheim amended its statement: “The Guggenheim does not plan to accept any gifts.”

#Opioides #Sackler #Philanthropie #Musées

Raymond SACKLER Officier of the Legion of Honor - France in the United States / Embassy of France in Washington, D.C.
▻https://fr.franceintheus.org/spip.php?article5052

Dear Dr. Sackler,
Dear Mrs. Sackler
Distinguished guests,
American and French friends,

It is a great pleasure and honor for me to be here with you today on this very special occasion and I would like to express my warmest thanks to Raymond Sackler, whom we are honoring today, for welcoming us to this beautiful location.

We are gathered here this afternoon to honor one of the most remarkable medical doctors in the field of Psychiatry and a very successful businessmanwho is also a great friend of France and an exceptional individual, Raymond Sackler.

I would like to thank Mr. Sackler’s family and friends who have joined us here this afternoon to show their support and admiration, with a special word of appreciation to his wife Beverly, to whom I also want to pay tribute.

Before proceeding with the ceremony, I would like to say a few words about the award I will bestow upon Mr. Sackler. The Legion of Honor was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to reward extraordinary accomplishments and outstanding services rendered to France.
It is France’s highest distinction and one of the most coveted in the world. And the rank of officier that I will bestow upon Raymond Sackler is truly exceptional.

Dear Dr. Sackler,

You have accomplished so much that it is difficult to briefly sum up all of your outstanding achievements.

Already at a very young age, you were interested in France and French culture. You first visited France in 1939, and since then, have come to France very often, becoming a true Francophile, as evidenced throughout your professional life and philanthropic activities.

Together with your brother Mortimer, also a medical doctor, you created a pharmaceutical laboratory in France that was and still is a great success story. Being aware of the caliber of French research in medical and pharmaceutical sciences, you chose France for their first industrial investment, co-funding Les Laboratoires SARGET (today MEDA-PHARMA). You developed this company by creating or acquiring several subsidiaries in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal.

You were incredibly successful, bringing the “Laboratoires SARGET” from a staff of a few hundred people in 1961, when it was created, to more than two thousand in 1987, when it was sold. With your brother and family, you later created another pharmaceutical company, MUNDIPHARMA, which is still growing, creating many jobs in France, and thus significantly contributing to the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in our country.

At the same time, you and your wife, Beverly, became patrons of a number of worthy causes: many scientific institutions, universities, and museums such as the Louvre and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux have benefited from your generosity. You also expressed a special interest in IHES, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, that is very well represented this afternoon.

I’d like to recognize the new Chairman of the Friends of IHES, Prof. Michael Douglas, the new Director of IHES Emmanuel Ullmo and its former director Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

If IHES is what it is today, a worldclass scientific center that is second to none, it is to a large extend thanks to you mon cher Jean-Pierre, to your talent, dedication and commitment to the Institute.

It is also thanks to the support of many of you, Luc Hardy, and Raymond and Beverly Sackler in particular.

Cher Raymond,

Since 1990, you have made 3 donations to IHES, leading to the creation of 2 permanent endowments to host 2 scientists every year. You also supported the agreement between IHES and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University. You encouraged IHES to diversify its scientific activities by making an additional donation in 2012 to create a Chair in Physics and Cosmology.

Your long friendship and tremendous generosity toward French arts and science mirror your exceptional qualities as human beings. Your professional and social success go hand in hand with a unwavering intellectual curiosity and a strong commitment to future generations.

You were originally named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by President Mitterrand. Your name had been proposed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benoît d’Abboville, then French Consul in New York, who presented you with the award here in New York in 1990.

Today, in recognition of your continued dedication and commitment to French-American cultural and scientific cooperation, the President of the French Republic has promoted you to the rank of Officier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur.

It is my great pleasure and privilege to award you this distinction. I will now proceed in French:

Raymond SACKLER,

Au nom du Président de la République, je vous fais Officier dans l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur.

#Opioides #Sackler #Légion_honneur

Introduction on #Useful_Art

Useful Art is not something new. It may have not be called that, it may not have had been mainstream in the art world, but it is a practice that somehow has become a natural path for artists dealing with political art and social issues.

All art is useful, yes, but the usefulness we are talking about is the immersion of art directly into society with all our resources. It has been too long since we have made the gesture of the French Revolution the epitome of the democratization of art. We do not have to enter the Louvre or the castles, we have to enter people’s houses, people’s lives, this is where useful art is. We should not care for how many people are going to museums (and I know sometimes they count even when they only come to use the restroom). We need to focus on the quality of the exchange between art and its audience.

And when I talk about audience, I have to say that while I understand and have worked in the past with the disparities and specificities of different audiences, I have found that useful art is a very efficient way to deal with both the informed and the non-informed audiences with the same level of interest and engagement. However, this also brings a lot of institutional challenges and should be acknowledged.

The prejudice with the practical usefulness of art is that it becomes design. And true enough while doing research on the term, I found that there was an exhibition titled: Useful Art in 1981 at the Queens Museum of Art, curate by John Perrault. When I talked to him to inquire more, since there was no documentation at the museum, I was told that the exhibition consisted of objects of utilitarian nature with a strong artistic design quality. But the utilitarian component I’m looking for does not aim to make something that is already useful more beautiful, but on the contrary aims to focus on the beauty of being useful. It looks at the research of the concept and potential of usefulness itself as an aesthetic category.

Why Useful Art in the headquarters of Immigrant Movement International? Because Useful Art is the medium I’m using to do this project and this is what you are going to see when you come here on a normal day. So I wanted to set up the conversation with what is mostly people from the art world today here on my methodology for this work so it can be judged from that perspective.

Useful Art is a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus on the implementation of art in society where art’s function is no longer to be a space for “signaling” problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions. We should go back to the times when art was not something to look at in awe, but something to generate from. If it is political art, it deals with the consequences, if it deals with the consequences, I think it has to be useful art.

Coincidentally while doing my research on the term, that I originally used in Spanish “#Arte_Útil” [which like in French (#art_utile) or Italian (arte utile) because they have a dimension that is lost in English-the fact that utile means also a tool], my friend Claire pointed to the Manifiesto de Arte Útil written by Argentinean artist Eduardo Costa in 1969. The scanned version is on our website www.immigrant-movement.us.

The manifesto is actually the description of the initial two works in his series Useful Art Works, done here in NYC on March 15, 1969, as part of street works performed by a group of artists and poets. The first of these works consisted of buying the missing metal street signs in the area of midtown New York on his own expense and placing them in the right place. The signs that read E42st, E51st, E49st, E45st, E44st, and W51st were intended to be considered as a discontinuous literary work with six lines.

The second Useful Art work he made consisted of painting the subway station at 42nd street and 5th Ave. on the Flushing line-the same line you may have taken to come here today. These art works were intended to attack the myth of the lack of utility of the arts while being in themselves a modest contribution to the improvement of the city living conditions. Both works were performed between 2:30 and 7a.m. to avoid any problems involving the municipal laws.

This shows us some of the ways in which initial Useful Art was solved. Now we are going to hear about the continuation of this research from our presenters and discuss some of the pros and cons of this practice in the following conversation.

I have always said that we have to put Duchamp’s urinal back in the restroom. Now that urinal is in the restroom of the Queens Museum, you can see it and pee on it.

http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/index.php?rex_resize=140h__useful_art_association_logo.jpg

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKPPmmNVuAs

cc @reka

The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis
►https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/es-101117-oxycontin-family-1507733616.jpg?crop=1xw:0.8890469416785206xh;center,top&resize=1200:*

The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

The Sackler name is no less prominent among the emerald quads of higher education, where it’s possible to receive degrees from Sackler schools, participate in Sackler colloquiums, take courses from professors with endowed Sackler chairs, and attend annual Sackler lectures on topics such as theoretical astrophysics and human rights. The Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science supports research on obesity and micronutrient deficiencies. Meanwhile, the Sackler institutes at Cornell, Columbia, McGill, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sussex, and King’s College London tackle psychobiology, with an emphasis on early childhood development.

The Sacklers’ philanthropy differs from that of civic populists like Andrew Carnegie, who built hundreds of libraries in small towns, and Bill Gates, whose foundation ministers to global masses. Instead, the family has donated its fortune to blue-chip brands, braiding the family name into the patronage network of the world’s most prestigious, well-endowed institutions. The Sackler name is everywhere, evoking automatic reverence; the Sacklers themselves, however, are rarely seen.

Even so, hardly anyone associates the Sackler name with their company’s lone blockbuster drug. “The Fords, Hewletts, Packards, Johnsons—all those families put their name on their product because they were proud,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine who has written extensively about the opioid crisis. “The Sacklers have hidden their connection to their product. They don’t call it ‘Sackler Pharma.’ They don’t call their pills ‘Sackler pills.’ And when they’re questioned, they say, ‘Well, it’s a privately held firm, we’re a family, we like to keep our privacy, you understand.’ ”

By any assessment, the family’s leaders have pulled off three of the great marketing triumphs of the modern era: The first is selling OxyContin; the second is promoting the Sackler name; and the third is ensuring that, as far as the public is aware, the first and the second have nothing to do with one another.

#Opioides #Sackler #Communication

French fear losing control of Louvre in Middle East

The Times & The Sunday Times
▻https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-fear-losing-control-of-louvre-in-middle-east-097n8nvxl

When the Louvre opened its first outpost in November, President Macron declared that the £3 billion museum in Abu Dhabi would be the repository of “creation, reason, intelligence and fraternity”.

Less than two months later, the custodians of one of the world’s most famous art collections are accused of losing control of the Louvre of the Sands, as it has been nicknamed, and becoming a tool in the hands of Abu Dhabi’s ruling Al Nahyan family, which also owns Manchester City football club. Far from bringing Renaissance values to the Gulf, the new museum is enveloping the Louvre in Middle Eastern culture, critics have argued. Didier Rykner, founder of La Tribune de l’Art, an art news website, said: “The Louvre has been kidnapped by diplomatic issues in the Middle East. It’s scandalous.”

The criticism came after the Abu Dhabi gallery omitted Qatar from a map next to an exhibit. Officials claimed it had been an oversight, but detractors said it was a deliberate slight borne of the diplomatic row between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the capital.

h
Inside the Louvre Abu Dhabi
“It’s like publishing a map of France and leaving off Brittany,” Mr Rykner said. “No one seriously believes it was a mistake.” The omission showed that the Louvre had little control over the Arab museum to which it has lent its name, he said. His concerns are shared by Jean Lebrun, a historian and radio presenter, who said Mr Macron had fallen into a trap laid by Abu Dhabi’s “ruling clan”. He said: “At the precise moment that it is extending its absolute monarchy, Paris has declared it to be the guarantor of tolerance and progress.”

Concerns first arose when the Louvre Abu Dhabi said that it was due to exhibit Salvator Mundi, the painting by Leonardo da Vinci which sold for a record $450.3 million in November.

The buyer was reported to be Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, a Saudi prince who is close to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Prince Bader is thought to have acquired the work for Abu Dhabi, although there has been no official confirmation.

Alexandre Kazerouni, a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies, Paris, said France was “not informed about this purchase, about which we know nothing of the details. This is a sign that the UAE authorities have politically appropriated the museum.”

The Arab world’s first universal museum was borne of a treaty between Paris and the UAE in 2007. France lent 300 artworks, including Monet’s La Gare Saint-Lazare, Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronnière and Edouard Manet’s The Fife Player, along with cultural expertise and the Louvre’s brand, for 30 years.

In return, Abu Dhabi agreed to pay €400 million for the right to use the name, along with other fees that could push the total sum up to €1.3 billion. The treaty says the museum will “work towards a dialogue between the East and the West, with each party respecting the cultural values of the other”.

Mr Rykner said: “Jean-Luc Martinez [the Louvre’s president] is very afraid of upsetting the authorities in Abu Dhabi, so he lets them do what they like.”

The Louvre declined to comment.

Did Jesus Have a Wife ? - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/2016/06/08/Opener/1920.jpg

... the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.
...
She said that if her own panel of experts agreed with the skeptical reviewer, she would abandon her plans to announce the find in Rome. She knew how high the stakes were, for both history and her own reputation. Some of the world’s most prestigious institutions—the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre—had been hoodwinked by forgers, and she didn’t want Harvard added to the list. “If it’s a forgery,” she told The Boston Globe, “it’s a career breaker.”

Il y a de tout dans cette histoire : Dan Brown, la Stasi, tous apôtres (enfin prèsque), des services secrets et plein de mystères de Berlin-Ouest pendant le mur ... à mourir de rire.

#Berlin #religion #faux

How security forces keep critics quiet in ’progressive’ UAE - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/uae-security-rights-media-free-speech-abduction.html

The result is a shiny veneer of liberalism — propped up by partnerships with Western organizations such as the Louvre, Guggenheim and New York University — while in reality the country operates like a modern police state.

#emirats_arabes_unis

Slaves of Happiness Island
▻http://www.vice.com/read/slaves-of-happiness-island-0000412-v21n8

My message to the head of the Louvre would be to come and see how we are living here,” said Tariq,* a carpenter’s helper working on construction of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a $653 million Middle Eastern outpost of the iconic Parisian museum. Set to be completed in 2015, its collection will include a Torah from 19th-century Yemen, Picassos, and Magrittes. Source: Vice United States

North Korea opens Munsu Water Park with over-the-top celebrations - Asia - World - The Independent

▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-opens-munsu-water-park-with-overthetop-celebrations-88943

In a show of over-the-top pomp and display that is typical of North Korea, the secretive state has unveiled a new water park in Pyongyang.

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8894441.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/Munsu-Water-Park-3.jpg

The Munsu Water Park in the East of the city is filled with colourful water slides, swimming pools and glass pyramids roofs similar to those at the Louvre in Paris.

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8894668.ece/ALTERNATES/w620/north-korea.jpg

#corée_du_nord

AP: Chavez Wasted His Money on Healthcare When He Could Have Built Gigantic Skyscrapers
▻http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/06/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-sky

One of the more bizarre takes on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death comes from Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson (3/5/13):

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

Je vous le traduis, parce que c’est assez incroyable…

Chavez a investi les bénéfices du pétrole du Vénézuela dans des programmes sociaux incluant des magasins d’alimentation gérés par l’État, des prestations en cash pour les familles pauvres, des cliniques de santé gratuites et des programmes éducatifs. Mais ces gains sont maigres comparées aux projets de construction spectaculaires que les richesses du pétrole ont investi dans les scintillantes villes du Moyen-Orient, notamment le plus haut building du monde à Dubai et des projets de branches des musées du Louvre et Guggenheim à Abu Dhabi.

France’s troubled suburbs: Forgotten in the banlieues | The Economist

Young, diverse and unemployed.

▻http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21572248-young-diverse-and-unemployed-forgotten-banlieues

WHEN the director of a job centre organised a visit to the Louvre for unemployed youngsters, she knew it would be a rare event. Sevran is one of France’s poorest places, north-east of the Paris périphérique. The jobless rate is 18%, and over 40% among the young. Yet the director was taken aback by how exceptional the visit proved. Of the 40 locals who made the 32km (20-mile) trip, 15 had never left Sevran, and 35 had never seen a museum.

Sevran is one of France’s 717 “sensitive urban zones”, most of them in the banlieues. In such places unemployment is over twice the national rate. More than half the residents are of foreign origin, chiefly Algerian, Moroccan and sub-Saharan African. Three-quarters live in subsidised housing; 36% are below the poverty line, three times the national average.

#France #banlieues #inégalités #jeunes