Selfie Sticks KOd in Art Museums and Versailles

Today Show "talent" taking a "selfie."
Ironically, Today's studio is alongside the Rockefeller Plaza promenade.
(Image: today.com)

During the year-end holidays, my wife and I walked around Rockefeller Plaza's promenade. What we remembered most from our stroll was a mass of selfie sticks protruding like periscopes on moderately turbulent seas. At the time, I called them "selfie sticks," without realizing the term already existed. My wife performed a quick online search and discovered the truth. That was fine with me, as I wasn't keen on claiming credit for coining the phrase.

The "selfie stick" phenomenon has not been a hit with art museums. According to an Associated Press story appearing in siliconvalley.com, a number of high-profile venues have banned the all-about-me device. Among them are New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and DC's Smithsonian. New entries among the verboten are the Palace of Versailles, where a selfie in the Hall of Mirrors would produce an image both vulgar and visually perplexing.

The "selfie stick" is merely one aspect of the "selfie shtick" phenomenon. In that context,  Kim Kardashian's book of "selfies" seems fitting, in that someone believed an audience existed for this expression of KK's endless vanity. However, online photo collections of one's "selfies" aren't different from Mrs. Kanye West's enterprise. The difference? Kim Kardashian has simply made money on the product known as "Kim Kardashian."

Dealer Allegedly at Center of Major Antiquities Theft Ring Dies

Euphonios krater
(photo from The New York Times)

Robert Hecht, Jr., a department store heir tied to a global antiquities theft network, died earlier this week at his Paris home at age 92. His obituary appeared in today's LA Times.

Hecht's discovered a passion for the antique world at a relatively young age. That profound interest led him into the world of buying and selling splendid physical remnants of the Greco-Roman world. He was best known for selling the Euphronios krater -- a masterpiece of Greek vase making -- to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met eventually returned the vase to its point of origin many years later, when the Italian fine arts bureaucracy, law enforcement, and legal apparatus convincingly demonstrated that the vase was smuggled out of Italy. However, the Met's gaffe was small potatoes compared to the Getty Museum's considerable traffic with the goods Mr. Hecht and his network were allegedly moving. The Getty's antiquities curator, Marion True, eventually was charged with criminal activity by Italian magistrates. The case, as well as one fingering Hecht, flopped. In both situations, the pursuit of the cases went beyond the time permitted under Italian law.

The underworld of fine art theft and smuggling offers an interesting story. For all the romantic tales of sophisticated thieves defying great odds to steal some valuable object, the reality is quite different. It involves hoodwinking a bureaucracy, doing plenty of dirty work behind the scenes, and having well-connected, respectable front men to make the transactions.

Hecht understood that world and, to some extent, shaped it. His passing does not exactly mark the end of an era. However, someone with Hecht's clout, money, and time, is rare, even in the world of high-stakes antiquity collecting.

Getty Museum's Legal Issues Over Armenian Bible Continue

Detail from circa 13th Century Armenian Bible

In recent years, top-layer museums have become embroiled over holdings which, in certain cases, have dodgy provenance. Marquee names, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, have made splashy settlements over allegations of harboring looted artifacts and treasures. A repeat actor in the art world's mercantile shadows is LA's Getty Museum. Its most recent controversy involves a legal fight over custody of beautiful pages of a nearly eight-century-old illuminated Armenian Bible.

The LA Times reported today on a judge's recent decision to encourage the opposing parties in the lawsuit to "compromise."  What that means is anyone's guess. The Times story does a good job of summarizing the case, its background, and its context in the larger, thorny issue of the right to acquire and keep portions of another nation's artistic patrimony. If you think the question is one of simple morality, just take a moment to imagine the Louvre without its "found" works. (Napoleon, for example, did a splendid job moving art work to the museum. The French government has not returned any of it, at least that I'm aware of.)

I don't know where the justice is in the current lawsuit against the Getty Museum. However, we all can take a moment to admire the exquisite artwork at the heart of the case. (The above image is a detail of one of the pages at issue in the court proceedings.) The pages were certainly created by a wonderful artist, who in all likelihood was a true believer in the spiritual world embedded in the Bible. We are fortunate that this work, and other artistic  from distant epochs, remain available and visible to us today.

Cleopatra's Needle

My wife and I recently had lunch at the Petrie Court in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were fortunate enough to get a window table. The restaurant's floor to ceiling windows offer a charming view of Central Park, including an unobstructed sight line to Cleopatra's Needle.

Why is Cleo's Needle there? If there were ever a citation for "miscast monument" in New York, the Egyptian obelisk would seemingly qualify. The red granite object appears as if it fell from the sky and landed in its upright, vertical position without any human intercession. Its hieroglyphics defy any organic connection to New York's past or present. It's true the monument was a gift from Egypt to the United States in the 19th Century, and one could argue this symbol of Egyptian gratitude to America has some connection to local history. However, one feels a far greater kinship to the Statue of Liberty, the French gift given during the same century as Cleopatra's Needle.

Yet, while we sat over lunch at the Petrie Court, I was fascinated by the obelisk. I wondered what the glyphs meant. I considered its lineage, which predates Cleopatra's reign by approximately a millenium. I thought about its twin, presented to the British and now in London. A third sibling, though not a twin, resides in the middle of Paris' Place de la Concorde.

I also recalled my first encounter with Cleo, during a St. Patrick's Day parade. I attended a parochial high school, which meant St. Patrick's Day was a day off. Many of us went to the parade, drank a bit, and used the 224 ton obelisk as a rendez-vous point. That was the extent of my curiosity for Cleo at that time. Over the years, I would walk past it, and the sight of the obelisk would reignite some wonder about it. Later, when I lived in Rome, obelisks were a natural part of the cityscape. Most of them were imported, just as New York's needle was. Pharaonic Egypt intrigued the ancient Romans, and the fascination with obelisks recurred over the centuries in the Eternal City, notably with Bernini. Seeing them on a daily basis helped me appreciate their elegant beauty and elusive history.

Cleopatra's Needle in New York now strikes me as a graceful monument whose simple geometry suggests a more profound message. The marvelously carved hieroglyphs tells a story I can not understand, but enjoy contemplating. However, even if I had a translation, the ideas communicated would remain enigmatic. How can I grasp the mathematics, astronomy, and religion Cleopatra's Needle suggests? All I know is that I respect the monument's austere beauty, and that its shape coincidentally resembles that of the Empire State Building.

Perhaps Cleopatra's Needle isn't so miscast, after all.