Art
The New BBC TV Series and What We Mean When We Say “Civilization”
PBS has now finished airing its series called Civilizations, a nine-part look at the global history of art, which is a well meaning but flawed production.
Michael Press
Test 2018 posts
An Illegal Archeological Dig in the West Bank Raises Questions About the Museum of the Bible
The Museum of the Bible has been funding a number of scholarly projects, including an illegal excavation in the West Bank that will certainly influence how the public understands the Bible and the ancient world.
Test 2018 posts
The Colonialist Myth of the Frenchman Who "Saved" the Pyramids
The troubling story fits a tired orientalist theme: Europeans and Americans know more, and care more, about the culture and heritage of West Asia and North Africa than their own inhabitants.
Art
How Antiquities Have Been Weaponized in the Struggle to Preserve Culture
Surveying the reporting on Syrian antiquities over the last six years reveals a parade of errors, but it is noteworthy that most, if not all, of the errors cut in the same way: to inflate the threat ISIS poses to cultural heritage while ignoring the threat posed by other armed groups.
Art
As the New Museum of the Bible Opens, Questions About its Scholarship Remain
The Museum of the Bible has the potential to reach a much greater audience than any individual scholar and there is real concern that it will selectively use scholarship to promote an evangelical Protestant view of the Bible and religion.
Art
How a Mark Twain Travel Book Turned Palestine into a Desert
The Innocents Abroad, the most famous 19th-century account of Palestine, is in the end an elaborate, sustained joke at the expense of the peoples and places of the Mediterranean.
Art
Letting Go of Our Obsession with Memorials
Over the past 50 years we have encountered the incentive to value every material trace of the past more and more, like we are a society with collective hoarding anxiety.
Art
Dispelling the Myths Around the Hobby Lobby Antiquities Case
The Hobby Lobby case brings up several vital issues relating to cultural heritage, theft, and war in West Asia, and many of our responses have so far been misdirected.
Art
The Getty's Online Palmyra Exhibition Falls into Orientalist Traps
A new online exhibition on the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra by the Getty Research Institute forgoes the city's historical complexity to take an Orientalist approach.
Art
Raiders of the Lost Archive: How Newly Discovered Manuscripts of Afghanistan Ended Up in Israel
Why is the National Library of Israel adding hundreds of stolen medieval manuscripts from Afghanistan to its collection?
News
The West's Empty Fetish for Ruins
Bloomington, IN. — If you live in Indianapolis and have a family, you’re probably familiar with Holliday Park, located among the elaborate homes of a wealthy north side neighborhood of the city.
Art
Why Do We Care About Palmyra So Much?
Why recreate Palmyra's Triumphal Arch and set it up in Western capitals? Why perform European art music in the ancient theater? The organizers suggest that each event is a show of solidarity with Syrians, but these gestures — Western groups drawing attention to ancient remains, primarily for Western