Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Is the British Museum the greatest museum on earth?

In an age when it can feel as if trash is about to breach the levees and flood the entire cultural landscape, two announcements have offered evidence of the surprising healthiness of the nation's appetite for the highbrow. The first was that the British Museum has overtaken Blackpool Pleasure Beach to become Britain's most popular cultural attraction. In the past year 6.04 million visitors crossed the threshold, trumping Blackpool on 5.5 million and Tate Modern with 5.23 million.

Mao Crazy: Global Art World's Love Affair with Mao

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic's mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collector

Art of deception: Crystal skulls in British, US museums were fakes

How about this for the next instalment of the Indy franchise: "Indiana Jones and the Dodgy Antiques Dealer"? Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery. Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal sk

Diverse museums open this summer

Three new but very different museums have opened this summer around the world. First to open in June was the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilisation, housed in a traditional Middle Eastern souq or indoor market. The museum in the United Arab Emirates contains over 5,000 artefacts from across the Islamic world arranged in themed galleries, from a Faith exhibition to a Science and Technology section. The Museum of the American Cocktail, meanwhile, opens on July 21st in New Orleans. Located near the

History TV network to retell September 11, WWII

Cable network History -- formerly known as the History Channel -- is retelling the stories of World War II and the September 11 attacks from a fresh perspective. The network has ordered a 10-part series, "WW II HD," for 2009 that will make use of 3,000 hours of restored color archival footage and hundreds of pages of unpublished diaries and journals to create what History said will be one of its most ambitious projects ever. Meanwhile, the network has compiled

Tolkien postcard found behind fireplace

A demolition worker has discovered a postcard which was written to JRR Tolkien 40 years ago stuck behind a fireplace. Stephen Malton, who runs Prodem Demolition in Bournemouth, was removing the fixtures from the author's former home in Poole, Dorset, before the property was demolished. As he dismantled the carved wooden fireplace he found three postcards, the last of which was addressed to Tolkien and dated 1968. Malton, 42, has now begun investigating how

FA Cup final ticket from 1895 discovered in dusty scrapbook to sell for

A ticket for the 1895 FA Cup final discovered in a dusty scrapbook recently is expected to fetch £3,000 at auction this week. The ticket cost 12.5p and gained the holder entrance into the match at Crystal Palace, which Aston Villa beat West Midlands rival West Bromwich Albion 1-0. The game, the first final to be played at Crystal Palace, remains famous for the fastest goal ever scored in an FA Cup final - 30 seconds - and also for the fact that the Cup was stolen shortly after

Gettysburg Cyclorama is to reopen on Sept. 26

The pair of soldier’s shoes is battered and hard-worn; a hole in one leather sole suggests the many miles trudged en route to battle with a rifled musket and canteen. These Civil War-style shoes are being pressed into duty for a battle that ended 145 years ago — not for last weekend’s re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg but for a conflict that still rages on the canvas of an enormous painting in the round. The Gettysburg Cyclorama, as it’s called, is to reopen on Sept. 26 after

Random House To Publish Fictional Laura Bush Book With Abortions, Lesbians & Presidential Sex

On the heels of two best-selling books, (Prep, The Man of My Dreams), young, Iowa-trained author Curtis Sittenfeld is about to release her most controversial book yet—a thinly veiled novel based on Laura Bush's life that is sure to send the White House into a fury. Published by Random House next fall, American Wife tells the story of Alice Blackwell, a quiet librarian whose husband Charlie becomes the bumbling president of the United States. It is, in short, a fictional examination of the life o

Iraq, the Movie: Burned by portrayals of Vietnam, the Pentagon focuses on a new era of filmmakers

There's a war going on, and Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale has a mission. But it's far removed from the captured Iraqi palace where he was once stationed. He fights his war now from an office on Wilshire Boulevard lined with movie posters chronicling conflicts real and imagined, from "Patton" to "War of the Worlds." Breasseale's desk is piled high with scripts, each marked with his name and stamped "confidential." It's his job to help dec

Hooch: The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced

Buddha’s Caves

DUNHUANG, China | SAND is implacable here in far western China. It blows and shifts and eats away at everything, erasing boundaries, scouring graves, leaving farmers in despair. It’s one of many threats to the major tourist draw of this oasis city on the lip of the Gobi desert: the hundreds of rock-cut Buddhist grottoes that pepper a cliff face outside town. Known as Mogaoku — “peerless caves” — and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-molded clay sculptures of savior-gods and

Thai Museum at Angkor Draws Tourists, and Criticism

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — There is no question that Angkor and its famed temples are among the world’s archaeological treasures, providing a window into the Cambodian dynasty that flourished there from the ninth century to the 15th century. But tourists who flock to the site in northwestern Cambodia say something is missing; few artifacts remain to help them imagine the customs and rituals of the ancient empire. Antiquities were looted over the centuries or appropriated by museums in Fr

How one cultural vision has lessons for the whole world

According to its director, Neil MacGregor, the monstrous iron gates of the British Museum have only twice in its history had to be closed to the public. The first time was in 1848, for fear of angry Chartist radicals. And the second was earlier this year, as thousands queued for the museum's Terracotta Army exhibition. But boast he might as last week the British Museum was named the nation's top visitor attraction - thrashing Tate Modern, Alton Towers, and even Madame Tussauds. Inst

Asylum paintings reveal tortured mind of murderous Victorian artist

Tortured images from the mind of the Victorian artist and brutal murderer Richard Dadd will shed light on the nature of his mental illness in a new London show this weekend. Dadd, who is one of the most macabre figures in British art history, spent more than 40 years in lunatic asylums after stabbing his father to death. For the remainder of his life the painter believed he was the victim of an ancient Egyptian curse. Despite his violent and delusional behaviour, Dadd i

The Auschwitz album

In June of 1945, after the war with Germany had ended, an American Army officer arriving in Frankfurt was told to look for a place to live within a part of the city which the Allies had enclosed with barbed wire. He found an abandoned apartment and did what he could to make it livable. Opening a closet door, he discovered an album of photographs. It had 31 pages, and 116 black-and-white images, the bulk of them a little smaller than a playing card, nearly all of them portraying German officers -

Thai museum at Angkor raises ire in Cambodia

There is no question that Angkor and its famed temples are among the world's archaeological treasures, providing a window into the Cambodian dynasty that flourished there from the ninth century to the 15th century. But tourists who flock to the site in northwestern Cambodia say something is missing; few artifacts remain to help them imagine the customs and rituals of the ancient empire. Numerous antiquities were looted over the centuries or appropriated by museums in France, the cou

Good Guys, Bad Guys and Spies, All Wrapped in ‘Edutainment’

“If I told you what secret documents I had in my briefcase,” I said in response to a jocular inquiry from a fellow visitor at the International Spy Museum here this week, “I’d have to kill you.” And if I did that, I added silently, I might end up in a homicide exhibit at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which opened in May a few blocks away. After spending a morning there, I wasn’t sure I was ready to return. It isn’t that the new crime museum isn’t worth seeing. Its 2

Waxwork Hitler beheaded in Berlin

A man has been arrested after tearing the head off a wax figure of Adolf Hitler at a newly opened branch of Madame Tussauds in Berlin. The 41-year-old man was held after attacking the waxwork, only hours after the attraction opened on Saturday. The inclusion of Hitler in the exhibition has aroused controversy in a country where Nazi symbols are banned. But the exhibition's organisers said they could hardly depict German history without portraying Hitler.

Treasures of Byzantium from far and wide show a rich, complex culture

The great historian Edward Gibbon called it "a triumph of barbarism and superstition". Voltaire declared it was "a disgrace to the human mind". All in all, Byzantium has not had a great press from post-enlightenment thinkers. But a new blockbuster exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London will aim to show the civilisation in a fresh light, "so that people will be able to understand the Byzantine world in all its complexity and glory", according to Charles Sa