NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

How Shocking: Met Unbuttons

Metropolitan Museum Sheds Its Metal Admissions Tags

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Metal tags will no longer be used as admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By MICHAEL SILVERBERG and RANDY KENNEDY

Published: June 27, 2013

The “French Connection” was in theaters. The Mets and the Yankees finished in fourth place. The city referred to itself as the Big Apple for the first time in advertising campaigns. And that same year, 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced a colorful piece of metal as its admission ticket, a tiny doodad that came to occupy a large place in the reliquary of New York City, along with Greek-themed coffee cups, I ♥ NY T-shirts and subway tokens.

Now the Met’s admission button will go the way of the token. Citing the rising cost of the tin-plate pieces and the flexibility of a new paper ticket system using detachable stickers, the Met will end the buttons’ 42-year run on Monday, the same time it switches to a seven-day-a-week schedule instead of being closed on Mondays.

“I regret it slightly myself,” said Thomas P. Campbell, the museum’s director. “One of my assistants has a whole rainbow of the colored buttons on her desk.” But he and Harold Holzer, the museum’s senior vice president for public affairs, who oversees admissions and visitor services, said that the buttons had become an antiquated luxury.

“We realize, without sounding crass, that it’s a beloved brand and a beloved symbol,” Mr. Holzer said. But the price of the metal has risen, he said, and the number of manufacturers the museum could go to for competitive prices has dwindled. “It just became too expensive. We saw that it was inevitable.”

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Metal admissions buttons are fashion accessories for visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but not after Monday.

Over the years of its existence, the button became an accidental tourist totem — evidence not only that the city had been visited but also that high culture had been revered. And the button became a kind of art object in its own right, described once by Met curators as a kind of coin with a “multilayered tissue of readings and meanings.” It has been recycled into artworks like Ji Eon Kang’s “Dress,” made from hundreds of the buttons assembled like chain mail. Its design has been incorporated into Met mugs and T-shirts. And it has been collected by the hundreds by a certain kind of Met devotee. (Collecting all 16 colors could also help you slip into the museum without paying the suggested $25 admission price; the colors are changed daily in random order.)

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A guide to the Met's colored buttons.

The current design, bearing an “M” adapted from a 16th-century woodcut illustration based on a Leonardo drawing, figures in the Met’s sense of its own identity, including the museum’s internal newsletter, which uses the button in its nameplate. Even the announcement that the Met would be open seven days a week borrowed the familiar iconography; it showed a line of six shiny buttons representing the days of the week, with a seventh added for Monday.

The buttons were introduced a year after the Met instituted a suggested-price admission system, replacing paper tickets and stickpins, and they seemed to capture the spirit of the new admissions policy, acting as a souvenir instead of a receipt.

“That badge became the un-ticket,” said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “You weren’t paying to get into the museum; you were making a donation. And in exchange you got this beautiful little thing that also has a control function.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metal admissions buttons from the Metropolitan Museum of Art have become dresses.

Museums around the world followed suit, with metal (or, increasingly, plastic) badges now standard issue in many institutions. The Met’s own badges have evolved too, in terms of text and typeface (an “M” set in Bodoni and the initials “MMA” are among past iterations), as well as color. Hundreds of shades have come and gone, and those now in use are known by idiosyncratic in-house nicknames — Mole, Hubba Bubba, Piglet, Poupon. The one-inch badges — known in the admissions-button industry as litho tabs — are made by Kraus & Sons, a manufacturing company based in Chelsea that also created the museum’s first banners in the 1960s.

To keep up with the more than six million people who visit each year, the museum orders 1.6 million of the buttons four times a year, Mr. Holzer said, and they now cost about three cents per button, up from two cents only a few years ago. The new paper tickets will cost only about a penny each, and they will give the museum the space to promote shows, new and soon to close, and, Mr. Holzer added, a space “to sell to corporate sponsors” for advertising.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The colored buttons in their storage bins.

The tickets will also be easier on the environment, though the Met does ask patrons to drop their buttons in a bowl on the way out the door, for placement in the city’s metal recycling system.

The new ticket-stickers will incorporate a version of the Leonardo “M,” evoking the button. But in an era in which physical objects seem to be rapidly dematerializing into the digital, the loss of a durable little chunk of the Met will undoubtedly be missed.

“It’s sad,” said Monica Mahoney, a 46-year-old fashion designer who recently moved to Los Angeles from New York but was back on Thursday and paying a visit to the museum, as she often does. “Everyone now will keep these, like they keep subway tokens. But it’s just a memory of New York.”

But other patrons say they will suffer from no postbutton nostalgia. “They always fall off,” said Malcolm Roberts, 66, a retired teacher who grew up in Brooklyn but now lives in Lakewood Ranch, Fla. “And then, walking around the museum, I would feel like the emperor — naked. If it’s the difference between buying a Monet and keeping these, they can buy the Monet.”

Print-At-Home Sculptures

Print-At-Home Sculptures

Jun 26 2013 @ 9:22am

They’ve arrived:

In his living room in San Diego right now, Cosmo Wenman has two life-sized reproductions of the British Museum’s Head of a Horse of Selene, a magnificently life-like sculpture with nostrils flared that dates to around 432 B.C. The original in Britain is made of marble, about three feet end-to-end. Wenman’s copies, created with an older digital camera and a MakerBot 3D printer, are clearly reproductions as soon as you lift them up. Created out of plastic, coated in a bronze patina, they weigh about 8 pounds each. For the last year or so, Wenman has been casing some of the world’s great sculptures for at-home replication, photographing them from every angle in plain sight inside the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Britain, the British Museum and a few others.

Wenman thinks 3-D printing could change the way we learn about and experience art:

Art museums have been scanning pieces like this for archival purposes for years. What’s new is that just about anyone can now walk into a gallery—assuming that photography is allowed—and do this, too. “To me,” Wenman says, “it seems very analogous to the potential behind the Napster-like free-for-all of unauthorized reproduction and sharing and remixing of music.”
Schoolchildren, he suggests, could reproduce their own art instead of flipping the pages in a text book. Artists could use the 3D designs to create modern sculpture inspired by famous antiquities, in much the same way that musicians sample each other. Smaller local museums, in particular, might use this as a way of drawing attention to little-known collections. And, of course, any 3D printing amateur could download these files to experience art that lives thousands of miles away.

Andy Warhol and the Persistence of Modernism

By CRISPIN SARTWELL

The June 20th issue of The New York Review of Books contains a devastating portrayal, by the art critic Richard Dorment, of the activities of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and its (now dissolved) sister institution, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The foundation was established, according to Warhol’s will, to provide for the “advancement of the visual arts,” and was to be funded by the sale of a large number of works the artist left to his estate. The board was assembled for the purpose of deciding whether a given work was an original Warhol. As I’ll explain, that task is hardly straightforward.
Dorment’s fundamental accusation is that members of these overlapping organizations were in a position to profit from the authentication process, and that this affected their decisions. Whether these accusations hold up or not, the Warhol situation epitomizes a curious fact about the art world since the postmodern period.
Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate throughout the postmodern period, and do so right up to the present moment, as though that critique never happened. Museums, foundations, government endowments, and university art departments all effortlessly absorbed a movement which was more or less devoted to destroying their conception of the arts. They treated the postmodernists exactly the way they’d treated the modernists.

The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board proceeded as if the postmodern era that Warhol crystallized never happened at all.

As the ur-postmodernist, Warhol’s entire artistic practice and persona stood, quite intentionally, in opposition to modernist ideas. He was the very antithesis of a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Pollock. Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media. He presented himself as a kind of empty mirror for the images that were already all around us in advertising or entertainment or packaging. And his persona was famously cool and withdrawn, or even blank: just the opposite of the outsized, impassioned personalities of Picasso or Pollock.
Nevertheless, like the arts establishment generally, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board proceeded as if the postmodern era that Warhol crystallized never happened at all. The board stamped, in indelible ink, works it rejected as original Warhols. Their decisions make a substantial difference in the art’s value.
Warhol left behind tens of thousands of items, many of which he never touched, except in some cases to add a signature. Both prints and “original paintings” were instead more or less designed by him and executed in various shops around town, which Warhol typically didn’t even bother to visit. The whole thing could be interpreted as a pointed demonstration that “originality” is over or pointless in the era of mass media.
What is and is not an original Warhol, in the Authentication Board’s definition, seemed to depend on what Warhol was aware of as it was being made: mere awareness is analogous, in Warhol’s case, to the hand of Pollock. Now the hand of Pollock may be difficult to distinguish from the hand of, say, a copyist, but an expert or true connoisseur could tell the difference. Discerning the direction of Warhol’s fleeting awareness in 1973, on the other hand, would be a challenge for an omniscient deity.

Related

More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

Yet remarkably, the entire discourse and institutional context which was developed in relation to Manet, Kandinsky or de Kooning, and explicitly attacked by Warhol and the postmodernists, is simply reproduced by the foundation, the board, and indeed by virtually all institutions that deal with postmodern art. It’s roughly analogous to scientists trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology.
Why is that? If modernism died in actual art practice, why did the art market and museum system go on as though nothing had ever happened? First of all, modernist ideology is extremely effective commercially. Once you jettison ideas like originality and genius, there is no justification for prices in the millions.
It is quite plausible to assert that, unlike most modernist masterpieces, a decent reproduction of a Warhol is as a good as an “original,” or for that matter is just as original. In virtue of what, precisely, would you distinguish them aesthetically? Is it that the original was brushed at a distance of some miles by Andy Warhol’s awareness?
Warhols are, to put it in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Benjamin famously asserted that, in a situation in which images could be copied cheaply and en masse, works of art were losing their “aura”: the sense of mystery and transcendent value that attended them. But aura is associated with rarity and preciousness: it limits supply and hence enhances or exponentially increases price. So, for those who stand to profit from postmodern art, the aura has to be imposed, invented, or (dis)simulated.
Second, whole generations of art lovers have been trained in modernist dogma, and arts institutions’ access to various forms of state or foundation support depend on it completely. One goes to the museum to gasp at stunning works of incomparable, super-human genius by beings who are infinitely more exalted and important than the mere humans staring at their paintings. That’s why ordinary people staring at a Picasso (allegedly) experience a kind of transcendence or re-articulation of their lives and world.
This quasi-religious approach was questionable enough with regard to the objects around which it developed, but it seems merely ridiculous when you are staring at a Warhol Brillo box, a Lichtenstein comic strip, or a Jenny Holzer text. You are definitely going to need experts to explain how these things could possibly be appreciated this way. And if they can’t be or shouldn’t be, or if they appear ridiculous or incomprehensible when they are, the institutions that house them stand to lose the justification for their existence and funding.
The institutional economics of art — public or private — depends on what the postmodern art theorist Rosalind Krauss called “the originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths.” It doesn’t matter what you do: if you are an “important artist,” arts institutions will portray you and market you as an original genius and your work as the high-water mark of human transcendence, which not incidentally increases its price. The canvas on which you have someone in Bangladesh stencil “this is not a work of original genius” will be “authenticated” as a work of original genius, and probably turn out to be more valuable than the Bangladeshi economy as a whole.

---

Crispin Sartwell teaches in the art department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. His most recent book is “Political Aesthetics.”

When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test

By MELENA RYZIK

Published: June 9, 2013 

Paintings fade; sculptures chip. Art restorers have long known how to repair those material flaws, so the experience of looking at a Vermeer or a Rodin remains basically unchanged over time. But when creativity is computerized, the art isn’t so easy to fix.

Enlarge This Image

Lehman College Art Gallery

A detail of the Web page of Douglas Davis’s interactive computer artwork “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence.”

For instance, when a Web-based work becomes technologically obsolete, does updated software simply restore it? Or is the piece fundamentally changed?

That was the conundrum facing the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 1995 became one of the first institutions to acquire an Internet-made artwork. Created by the artist Douglas Davis, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence” functioned as blog comments do today, allowing users to add to the opening lines. An early example of interactive computer art, the piece attracted 200,000 contributions from 1994 to 2000 from all over the globe.

By 2005 the piece had been shifted between computer servers, and the programmer moved on. When Whitney curators decided to resurrect the piece last year, the art didn’t work. Once innovative, “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence” now mostly just crashed browsers. The rudimentary code and links were out of date. There was endlessly scrolling and seemingly indecipherable text in a format that had long ago ceased being cutting edge.

“This is not how one uses the Internet now,” Sarah Hromack, the Whitney’s director of digital media, said. “But in the ’90s, it was.”

For a generation, institutions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Pompidou Center in Paris have been collecting digital art. But in trying to restore the Davis work, which was finally debugged and reposted at the end of May, the Whitney encountered what many exhibitors, collectors and artists are also discovering: the 1s and 0s of digital art degrade far more rapidly than traditional visual art does, and the demands of upkeep are much higher. Nor is the way forward clear.

“We’re working on constantly shifting grounds,” said Rudolf Frieling, a curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has been at the forefront of sustaining online art. “Whatever hardware, platform or device we’re using is not going to be there tomorrow.”

“Frankly speaking,” he added, “it’s a huge challenge. Not every museum is set up to do that. It takes huge technical expertise.”

The riddles are only solved by “actually doing it,” Mr. Frieling explained.

At the Whitney, a team of programmers and curators spent more than a year debating and tinkering with the restoration of “Collaborative Sentence.” Mr. Davis, a pioneer in technologically enhanced art who is now 80, was unable to take part in consultations on rebuilding his piece, and without a creator’s blueprint in place, almost every meeting turned into a conceptual debate.

“One of the biggest philosophical questions,” said Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media at the museum, “was, do we leave these links broken, as a testament to the Web” and its rapid development?

Like much early digital art, “Collaborative Sentence” is still valuable, Ms. Paul said, especially as a harbinger of the future. By allowing interaction across cultures and countries, “it anticipated so much of what happened in Web 2.0,” she said.

But many artists, curators and patrons are now reconsidering whether such art should remain unchanged, said Pip Laurenson, the head of collection care research at the Tate Gallery in London. “It’s no longer the model that a museum acquires something into its collection and tries to fix it into the time it was acquired or when it left the artist’s studio.”

The Whitney considered several options. One was to simply let technological extinction take its course, and view Web-based art as “ephemeral, like a performance,” Ms. Paul said.

Another tactic was to let the new generation of Web-based creators and everyday Internet users help with the maintenance. Or the Whitney could attract more viewers by modernizing the design of the piece. But, Ms. Paul said, “that seemed too radical an intervention.”

After much deliberation, the curators decided on a nearly unheard-of artistic solution: to duplicate Mr. Davis’s installation and present it in both original and updated forms.

One version is the frozen original, with broken code, pages of oddly formatted, garbled text and instructions for users who wanted to fax in their contributions (including the number for the Lehman College gallery, which first showed the piece). Links were redirected, through the archiving site the Wayback Machine, to their 1990s counterparts.

“The idea is that it’s sort of a time capsule,” said Ben Fino-Radin, a digital archivist who helped rebuild the work.

The new version, which the Whitney calls the live version, looks similar but has some new links. Users can’t contribute to the historical site, but they can add to the live one — albeit not by fax. The Whitney also open-sourced part of the original, hoping that users would contribute to its upkeep.

In 1995 Mr. Davis’s piece was shown in a biennial in South Korea attended by the celebrated video artist Nam June Paik. It has hundreds of comments in Korean, but the code for the characters was so degraded that Mr. Fino-Radin was stumped. If other viewers fix it, he said, seeing those messages “will be a first for Western audiences.”

With new digital art being created ever more rapidly, the debate over sustaining it will continue, just as surely as the technology leapfrogs ahead of it. Over the last decade, experts at the New Art Trust, the Tate Modern in London and the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco started Matters in Media Art, a consortium dedicated to studying these issues. Another group, the Variable Network, was started by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology.

Aided by organizations like Rhizome, where Mr. Fino-Radin is based and which works with emerging artists and art forms, they have helped spread the word about the urgent need for conservation.

“For institutions that early on committed to Net art, a lot of that work is now vanishing,” Ms. Paul said.

And the proliferation of online culture, social media and smart gadgets — and whatever the next tech revolution brings — will make preserving those visionary moments “more challenging,” she said. “Not less.”

A New World Order for Photography

• by Chloe Pantazi on June 5, 2013

“A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial,” installation view at the International Center of Photography (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

The notion of order is really rather muddled: as we put things together to make sense of them, we also surrender some of their meaning. And by its nature, order is perpetually shifting; rules are imposed, then they are broken, reconfigured. This paradox is at the heart of the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) fourth triennial, A Different Kind of Order. As its title suggests, the exhibition, which showcases the work of 28 international artists, responds to the flux of our time. Recent years have been rife with revolution — from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement — and as the world changes shape around us, we require new ways to interpret and understand it. A different sort of order is certainly taking hold, and with it a new aesthetic sensibility.

Elliott Hundley, “Pentheus” (2011) (click to enlarge)

Upon walking into the galleries at the ICP, the viewer is immediately confronted with four green, foliage-covered canvases taking up much of the facing wall: a magnificent, three-dimensional eyesore of photography and collage by the LA-based artist Elliott Hundley. The latest in Hundley’s Bacchae series, “Pentheus” (2010) retells Euripides’ tale of the king of Thebes. A large photograph in the background shows an image from the story: a man standing, holding a cloak to his body, while Pentheus lays defeated before him, his buttocks and legs bare and his torso out of the picture. But the image is nearly hidden, covered with found paraphernalia: misty-eyed magnifying glasses suspended on pins; photos of industrial matter, car tires, cigarettes, movie stars’ faces, contorted male bodies dangling from springy metal; and snippets of Euripides’ text. Just as Pentheus was ultimately splintered into pieces in the myth, his tale seems to self-combust on Hundley’s canvas. The piece is such a mess that it shouldn’t work — one might conceive that “Pentheus” had been grown from a strange patch of earth, rather than created — but from its sheer disorder comes its beauty.
Because “Pentheus” looms so large, one might easily overlook British artist Mishka Henner’s little triptych of pixelated panoramas from her Dutch Landscapes series (2011) hanging on the wall to its right. Looking at Henner’s work after Hundley’s is a bit like listening for a whisper after hearing a scream, but it’s a quiet worth paying attention to. Pulled from Google Earth, Henner’s photos capture three areas of Holland seen from an aerial perspective, with reams of green fields, beige creases of road, immobile cars, and the roofs of houses. But these images are censored and interrupted, their detail obfuscated by colorful clusters of pixels that discontinue a road, slice a house in half. As the accompanying caption explains, when Google Earth was established four years after 9/11, in order to adhere with security measures instigated by government officials, “Google — or the image suppliers that Google uses — agree[d] to obscure the details of sites that were deemed sensitive.” By bringing to light these manipulated stills, Henner points out that censorship doesn’t divert attention but instead invites it, and that despite the abundance of information the internet offers, total transparency has yet to be achieved. There are limits to what we can see.

Mishka Henner, “Dutch Landscapes” (2011)

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Touching Reality” (2012) a video that shows a hand scrolling through a stream of photos of atrocities on an iPad, suggests that there shouldn’t be. Following wherever the hand in the video led me — through photographs of bloodied corpses, blown off heads and limbs, and reeling, wounded bodies — I was both repelled and intrigued; I didn’t want to look anymore, but I couldn’t stop looking. Yet after a short time, I grew accustomed to the pictures, and their violence seemed to fade. I became less disturbed by the photos and more concerned with how they no longer seemed to bother me. Looking around the room, it occurred to me that all of us watching were playing against each other in a tacit game of who could look the longest without flinching, without leaving the room. Some people left at the first glimpse of blood, while others stood for the duration uncomfortably, or stared nonchalantly at the screen as though it was showing an infomercial.
Meanwhile, I began paying closer attention to the hand and how it swiped through to the next image, noting the length of time it lingered on each picture and its hunger for clarity as it zoomed in on an unclear detail, as well as the satisfaction with which it zoomed back out again. The voyeurism of “Touching Reality” isn’t offensive, nor is the video violent for violence’s sake. Rather, Hirschhorn gives us these cruel images to break the barricade of censorship  and to show us ourselves — our simultaneous inability to control what we see and reluctance to look away.
An alternative way of seeing also informs the work of Tokyo-based artist Sohei Nishino. From afar, Nishino’s photomontages “Jerusalem, 2013” and “New York, 2006,” from his series Diorama Maps, look like standard monochrome pictures of the two cities taken from a bird’s-eye view. Closer up, however, they resemble revised blueprints made up of hundreds of photos of each city’s buildings, monuments, and sometimes people. Nishino is a kind of flâneur: after walking around photographing a city for a month, the artist develops the photos on contact sheets, cuts out the individual images he wishes to use, and then, over three to four months, reassembles them according to his memory of the city, re-creating a particular “vision” of it. Finally, Nishino photographs this larger collage, its parts seamlessly connected to form a printed whole.

Sohei Nishino, “New York, 2006″ (2006) (click to enlarge)

On a basic level, we might consider Nishino’s memory maps one-page photo albums of each city, but the collages amount to more than collected memories. Although they’re real places, the artist’s cities remind me of the ones in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities; in the way that Calvino imagines that “each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up,” Nishino has dreamed up the places in his photographs. One gets the sense that they were always bustling in his mind, and in his work, they appear as he has curated and remembered them.
Looking at Nishino’s New York, Manhattan isn’t geographically precise or proportionate; Times Square isn’t exactly where it should be, and neither are Ground Zero or the Empire State Building. And with the photographs heaped over each another, Manhattan looks more like a giant high-rise skyscraper, every block another brick, every street another floor, than anything else. Meanwhile, the East and Hudson Rivers that frame the island are blurred and incomprehensible, while the bridges over them seemingly lead nowhere. And yet somehow, without giving a clear picture, Nishino’s reimagined city lends an almost authentic experience of Manhattan that a map could not: there’s the feeling of being at once marooned and preoccupied, distracted and inspired, in one place and somewhere else.
Nishino’s cities breach the laws of geography, Hundley’s “Pentheus” meddles with mythology, while Henner and Hirschhorn point to the world’s disorder. These works and others at the ICP show us the result of smaller, albeit significant, aesthetic revolutions, and the different forms those changes can take. Order is as chaotic and mutable as any city or story, and the exhibition invites viewers to approach the works much as the artists have themselves, by challenging and deconstructing pertinent ideas. The ICP triennial suggests that perhaps the point of order is that there isn’t only one — and that by engaging with these works, which sort through the discontents of a changing world, we remain open to understanding it.
A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial continues at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown, Manhattan) through September 8.

Iron in Egyptian relics came from space

Meteorite impacts thousands of years ago may have helped to inspire ancient religion.

• Jo Marchant

29 May 2013

The Gerzeh bead (top) has nickel-rich areas, coloured blue on a virtual model (bottom), that indicate a meteoritic origin.

Open Univ./Univ. Manchester

Article tools

• Print
• Email
• Rights & Permissions

• Share/bookmark

The 5,000-year-old iron bead might not look like much, but it hides a spectacular past: researchers have found that an ancient Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite.
The result, published on 20 May in Meteoritics & Planetary Science¹, explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion.
“The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians,” says Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper. “Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.”
The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo. The cache dates from about 3,300 bc, making the beads the oldest known iron artefacts from Egypt.
A study in 1928 found that the iron in the beads had a high nickel content — a signature of iron meteorites — and led to the suggestion that it was of celestial origin². But scholars argued in the 1980s that accidental early smelting could have led to nickel-enriched iron³, and a more recent analysis of oxidized material on the surface of the beads showed low nickel content⁴.

Related stories

• The death of the Chebarkul meteor
• Ancient Egyptian chariot trappings rediscovered
• Ancient Egyptians used 'hair gel'

More related stories

To settle the argument, Diane Johnson, a meteorite scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and her colleagues used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyse one of the beads, which they borrowed from the Manchester Museum.
The researchers were not able to cut the precious artefact open, but they found areas where the weathered surface had fallen away, providing what Johnson describes as "little windows" to the preserved metal beneath.
Microscopy showed that the nickel content of this original metal was high — as much as 30% — suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. Backing up this result, the team observed that the metal had a distinctive crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. This structure is found only in iron meteorites that cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming.
Using tomography, the researchers built up a three-dimensional model of the bead's internal structure, revealing that the ancient Egyptians had made it by hammering a fragment of iron from the meteorite into a thin plate, then bending it into a tube.

Gifts from the gods

The first evidence for iron smelting in ancient Egypt appears in the archaeological record in the sixth century bc. Only a handful of iron artefacts have been discovered in the region from before then: all come from high-status graves such as that of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. "Iron was very strongly associated with royalty and power," says Johnson.
Objects made of such divine material were believed to guarantee their deceased owner priority passage into the afterlife.
Campbell Price, a curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum who was not a member of the study team, emphasizes that nothing is known for certain about the Egyptians’ religious beliefs before the advent of writing. But he points out that later on, during the time of the pharaohs, the gods were believed to have bones made of iron.
He speculates that meteorites may have inspired this belief, the celestial rocks being interpreted as the physical remains of gods falling to Earth.
Johnson says that she would love to check whether other early Egyptian iron artefacts are of meteoritic origin — if she can get permission to study them.

Why the Pope Wears Red Shoes

Massimo Gatto

Getty Images

Pope Benedict XVI in London, England, September, 2010

Romans knew that the timetable for the papal conclave would be a quick one when the three sets of vestments prepared for the new pontiff—in small, medium, and large sizes—had already disappeared from the display window of Gammarelli, the ecclesiastical tailors, on Friday, March 8. The three white wool satin cassocks had appeared on March 4, along with one scarlet capelet, the mozzetta, trimmed in white ermine, versatile enough for one size to fit any aspiring pontiff, a single pair of red kangaroo-leather shoes in a medium size and a white moiré silk zucchetto, the pontifical skullcap. Though they are loaded with Christian significance, many of these articles of clothing actually have a far more ancient pedigree.
Those red shoes, for example—which the pontifex emeritus has now given up in favor of a more ordinary brown pair from Mexico—may symbolize the blood of Christian martyrs. But when red shoes were the height of fashion in Etruscan Rome, that is, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, they designated the wearer as an aristocrat, someone who could afford leather that had been colored with the most expensive dye in the Mediterranean, Phoenician “purple”—which was actually scarlet red. (It was produced by scoring the bodies of molluscs and ranged in color from blue to red, with red the most prized shade.) The leather itself came not from kangaroos, of course, but from the Chianina cattle, who came to Italy together with the Etruscans and provided the ancestral form of Florentine beefsteak.

Gianni Degli Orti/Corbis

Detail showing an aristocratic Etruscan in red shoes and toga, together with a priest, or augur, and servants, Tomb of the Augurs, Tarquinia, Italy

Can it be coincidence that shoemakers like Maurizio Gucci of Florence and Salvatore Ferragamo of Campania and Florence came from places with strong Etruscan connections? A tomb painting from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia, executed perhaps around 530-520 BC, shows several mourners in elegant pointed boots. The people portrayed in this “Tomb of the Augurs” may well have had close connections with Rome, where the ruling dynasts were named Tarquinius, and the tyrant-slayer Brutus, credited with founding the Roman Republic a few years after this tomb was decorated (509 BC), was actually a Tarquinius on his mother’s side. When Roman patricians sported red shoes in subsequent centuries, they were simply carrying on ancestral tradition. With the red shoes went a red-striped robe, again in Phoenician purple—a wide stripe for members of the Senate, a narrower stripe for the second-rank aristocrats known as horsemen, equites. After the coming of Christianity, the tradition of wearing red passed from the Roman Senate to the “Sacred Senate,” the College of Cardinals. Cardinal red, in fact, is Roman senatorial red, derived from Phoenician purple (or a cheaper—but not cheap—substitute called cochineal, made by grinding the shells of beetles).

A reenactment of a flamen dialis

The pope also inherited an ancient Roman priestly title, Pontifex Maximus, this too, almost certainly passed down from the Etruscans, along with Etruscan priestly paraphernalia like the folding chair we see a servant carrying in the Tomb of the Augurs. A crooked staff called the lituus (one of these also appears in the Tomb of the Augurs) eventually turned into a symbolic shepherd’s crook for Christian pastors, but only long after it had been used by Etruscan priests called augurs to divine the future by scrutinizing the heavens and the flight patterns of birds. Even the zucchetto, a word that means “little squash,” may owe its stem not to botany, but to the bizarre headgear worn by the ancient Roman priest of Jupiter, the flamen dialis; an alternative title for popes during the Renaissance was “Jupiter the Thunderer.”
Today the Pope is rarely seen under the canopy known as the umbraculum, but that honorific sunshade symbolizes his office during the sede vacante. The umbraculum, too, first appears in Etruscan times, shielding aristocrats from the sun’s rays—as in China, umbrellas seem to have been invented first to keep away the sun rather than the rain. Even the idea of the conclave, the locked-in gathering, has a kind of Etruscan antecedent. On the sarcophagus of a woman named Hasti Afunei from Chiusi, the underworld spirit Vanth carries a torch to light the way for the soul of the deceased and a key to unlock the gates of Hades. The doorkeeper for the Sistine Chapel is more soberly clad than Vanth, but she is a close relative of Michelangelo’s devils in the Last Judgment on the Sistine Chapel wall. (Michelangelo, of course, was a proud Tuscan—that is, Etruscan.)

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Etruscan lady Ramtha Vishnai with another woman under a parasol (left), on the sarcophagus of Arnth Tetnies and Ramtha Vishnai found in Vulci, Italy

Annibale Gammarelli and Company only claim to have been tailoring for priests since 1798, but it is tempting to think that an ancestral Gammarelli produced the sumptuous red robe of Vel Saties, augur of Vulci, two dozen centuries earlier. If nothing else, Vel’s tailor was clearly a kindred spirit.

Mandarin Graffiti

A Chinese teenager defaced the Luxor Temple. That’s bad, but scribbling on Egyptian antiquity is as old as tourism itself.

By Rolf Potts|Posted Friday, May 31, 2013, at 7:15 AM

Tourists take pictures as they walk inside the Luxor Temple in Luxor city, around 650 km (404 miles) south of Cairo, December 4, 2010.
Photo by Asmaa Waguih/Reuters

China is very sensitive about its international reputation. That explains why a single act of tourist vandalism—committed by a Chinese citizen while overseas—has created a social-media uproar in the country. The controversy began last Friday, when a Chinese traveler named Shen Yuwen logged on to the social media site Weibo and posted a snapshot of a 3,500-year-old Luxor Temple carving that had been scratched over with the phrase, "Ding Jinhao was here." ("It was the saddest moment during my stay in Egypt, and I felt ashamed," Shen lamented.) The photo quickly went viral, prompting online outrage, and in less than 24 hours netizens had publicly identified "Ding Jinhao" as a 15-year-old middle school student from Nanjing. Amid online declarations of national disgrace and social-media death threats, Ding's family came forward to express their regrets in a local newspaper. "We want to apologize to the Egyptian people and to people who have paid attention to this case across China," Ding's mother stated, adding that the boy had "cried all night" out of shame over the incident.

Ding should be ashamed—but he’s hardly the first. Indeed, the teenager’s defacement of a priceless piece of Egyptian antiquity is merely the latest expression of a tourist tradition that is nearly as old as tourism itself. In Travel in the Ancient World, historian Lionel Casson notes that evidence of the practice dates back at least to 2000 B.C., when Hena, a high official under Mentuhotep III, chiseled his name and accomplishments into the sandstone of Wadi Hammamat, near the Red Sea. Elsewhere, at Giza, scratchings on a temple wall, dated to 1244 B.C., read: "Hadnakhte, scribe of the treasury, came to make an excursion and amuse himself on the west of the Memphis, together with his brother, Panakhti." Scribes, perhaps unsurprisingly, accounted for the bulk of such graffiti, and Casson notes that their inscriptions follow a fairly standard formula: "Scribe So-and-So … of the clever fingers came to see the temple of the blessed King So-and-So." Most such messages were painted onto monuments with a brush or scratched into the stone with a sharp point.

The Golden Age of graffiti on Egypt's tourist-circuit monuments coincides with the heyday of the imperial Romans. In Pagan Holiday, a travel-themed account of the ancient Roman Grand Tour, author Tony Perrottet observes that travelers of the era regarded the Great Pyramid as "a vast, open visitor's book, where every tourist could chisel his or her impressions. This was not considered defacement, but a grab at immortality—an effort by visitors to join their own fates to the most enduring of mankind's creations." Many inscriptions read, simply, "I was amazed!" One Roman tourist visiting the Valley of the Kings took a cue from Julius Caesar's famous line and enthused, "I looked, I investigated, I arrived, I marveled."

Advertisement

Touristic graffiti underwent a modern renaissance in the 19^th century, as Industrial Age European travelers fanned out across what came to be known as the "Near East," leaving thousands of inscriptions in their wake. So common was the practice of scratching one's name into Egyptian monuments that French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, having no time to visit the pyramids during an 1806 Egypt sojourn, sent an emissary out to engrave his name for him. ("One has to fulfill all the little obligations of a pious traveler," he noted in his journal.) Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni is as much remembered for his prolific graffiti as he is for his contributions to Egyptology—and the large "Belzoni" inscription he left on the walls of the Ramesseum can be viewed not far from the serif-engraved surname "Rimbaud," allegedly left by the French poet, on the sandstone walls of Luxor Temple.

The French novelist Gustave Flaubert was not impressed by the graffiti he found during an 1850 journey through Egypt. "One is irritated by the number of imbeciles' names written everywhere," he wrote, noting that the name and address of a certain Parisian wallpaper manufacturer had been written, in black letters, at the top of the Great Pyramid. "In Alexandria," he added, "a certain Thompson, of Sunderland, has inscribed his name in letters 6 feet high on Pompey's Pillar. You can read it from a quarter of a mile away. … All imbeciles are more or less Thompsons from Sunderland. How many of them one comes across in life, in the most beautiful places and in front of the finest views!"

Ding Jinhao's graffiti

With the rise of mass tourism in the 20^th century, Flaubert's chagrin was echoed by upper-class travelers alarmed by the spectacle of tour buses at ancient monuments. Soldiers and sailors famously indulged in tourist graffiti during the World War II era ("Kilroy was here" inscriptions, left by American GIs, have been found everywhere from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to the Marco Polo Bridge in China), but by the mid–20^th century, travel guidebooks were specifically condemning the practice, which fell out of favor among middle-class travelers.

In Egypt, defacing monuments is a serious offense. The crime can carry a fine of more than $20,000 and up to 12 months in prison. It's unlikely that young Ding Jinhao will ever face prosecution in Egypt. (The country’s local tourism authorities have announced that the marks made by Mr. Ding were superficial and have been removed.) Still, the issue has catalyzed an important discussion among Chinese travelers. In the wake of the uproar, China's National Tourism Administration has stepped up its efforts in promoting a new set of guidelines for countrymen traveling abroad. Asserting that "being a civilized tourist is the obligation of each citizen," the government agency is urging Chinese tourists to refrain from touching or writing on cultural relics, and avoid engaging in uncouth habits such as spitting, littering, jaywalking, vandalism, and cutting in line. Even before Ding's shaming, well-publicized reports of Chinese boorishness in places like France and Hong Kong compelled the nation's officials to draft new tourism laws that give tour companies the power to "revoke the contracts" of misbehaving clients. Meanwhile, Xinhua News Agency reports that the nation's netizens have begun to investigate incidences of domestic graffiti, including a tourist etching on an ancient iron jar in Beijing's Palace Museum and an inked message in a Xia Dynasty grotto in Gansu Province.

What makes this all significant lies less in the specific incidents than in the fact that China is on the cusp of a travel boom that may well dwarf all previous waves of tourism to places like Egypt. One teenager scratching his name into Luxor Temple is hardly remarkable, given the history of the site—but the reality of 100 million Chinese citizens expected to embark on international journeys by 2015 means that a little public shaming could ultimately do us all some good.