A first version of this essay - focused on new museum policies at MACRO, the Contemporary Art Museum of the City of Rome - has been posted to my blog MuseumStudies on Tumblr (5, 6, 7, and 11 July 2011) under the name “Kafka at MACRO, the true inside story - OR - How Not To Run A Museum (Act 1-4)”.
This presentation has been prepared for the first Regional Open Source Conference - Central Asia, and shown on 18 October 2011 at the ICT Institute of Kabul, Afghanistan.
This document has been prepared for the residential workshop organised by MuseImpresa in Parma (30 September - 1 October 2011). It tries to take some hype away from the term "museum apps", and to give some guidelines to choose among the offers museum professionals may receive.
A presentation by Alessandro Califano for the UNESCO capacity building training for museum professionals in Uzbekistan, running under the title: "In Quest for Excellence: Museums Between Local and Global Presence".
Tashkent, June 2008
Transcript from a presentation delivered by the author at UNESCO's capacity building workshop for museum professionals in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in June 2008.
Standards, prototypes, and pilot projects - technology and flexibility in des...Alessandro Califano, PhD
This presentation is a slightly enhanced version of the one introducing, on behalf of ICOM Italy, its "Commissione tematica per gli Audiovisivi e le Nuove Tecnologie", and ICOM-AVICOM, CDCH 2012, a Satellite Workshop at VL/HCC 2012 - IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (Innsbruck, Austria, 4 October 2012).
This is the original Italian version of the presentation prepared for the "Black & White Architecture in Oscar Savio's Pictures" exhibition, scheduled at MACRO Museum between January 22 and April 05, 2010. The exhibition is based on some pictures chosen from CRDAV's Photo-archive.
An English version of this presentation will follow soon.
Archaeology - Hidden Stupa, Buddhist Monastery in Samangan (Afghanistan)Alessandro Califano, PhD
In October 2008 I visited Samangan’s Takht-i Rostam, in northern Afghanistan, on my way from Mazar-i Sharif to Kabul with Qais, a Pansheri driver kindly provided by People in Need (a Czech NGO that has been already for a long time in Afghanistan, providing exellent help to people - many thanks to them!).
This area includes a great stupa, hidden in the mountain - only the top slightly popping up - and a vast net of monastic cells in a nearby, lower hill.
The Buddhist archeological area is relatively well preserved, also due to the fact that locals thought the meditation cells in a row to be an ancient bazar - which made them utterly uninteresting and spared them from any possible outburst of religious zeal...
This presentation was prepared for the capacity building workshop for museum professionals organized by UNESCO at Kabul National Museum of Afghanistan in May 2010.
This presentation has been prepared for the first Regional Open Source Conference - Central Asia, and shown on 18 October 2011 at the ICT Institute of Kabul, Afghanistan.
This document has been prepared for the residential workshop organised by MuseImpresa in Parma (30 September - 1 October 2011). It tries to take some hype away from the term "museum apps", and to give some guidelines to choose among the offers museum professionals may receive.
A presentation by Alessandro Califano for the UNESCO capacity building training for museum professionals in Uzbekistan, running under the title: "In Quest for Excellence: Museums Between Local and Global Presence".
Tashkent, June 2008
Transcript from a presentation delivered by the author at UNESCO's capacity building workshop for museum professionals in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in June 2008.
Standards, prototypes, and pilot projects - technology and flexibility in des...Alessandro Califano, PhD
This presentation is a slightly enhanced version of the one introducing, on behalf of ICOM Italy, its "Commissione tematica per gli Audiovisivi e le Nuove Tecnologie", and ICOM-AVICOM, CDCH 2012, a Satellite Workshop at VL/HCC 2012 - IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (Innsbruck, Austria, 4 October 2012).
This is the original Italian version of the presentation prepared for the "Black & White Architecture in Oscar Savio's Pictures" exhibition, scheduled at MACRO Museum between January 22 and April 05, 2010. The exhibition is based on some pictures chosen from CRDAV's Photo-archive.
An English version of this presentation will follow soon.
Archaeology - Hidden Stupa, Buddhist Monastery in Samangan (Afghanistan)Alessandro Califano, PhD
In October 2008 I visited Samangan’s Takht-i Rostam, in northern Afghanistan, on my way from Mazar-i Sharif to Kabul with Qais, a Pansheri driver kindly provided by People in Need (a Czech NGO that has been already for a long time in Afghanistan, providing exellent help to people - many thanks to them!).
This area includes a great stupa, hidden in the mountain - only the top slightly popping up - and a vast net of monastic cells in a nearby, lower hill.
The Buddhist archeological area is relatively well preserved, also due to the fact that locals thought the meditation cells in a row to be an ancient bazar - which made them utterly uninteresting and spared them from any possible outburst of religious zeal...
This presentation was prepared for the capacity building workshop for museum professionals organized by UNESCO at Kabul National Museum of Afghanistan in May 2010.
Metanomics is a weekly Web-based show on the serious uses of virtual worlds. This transcript is from a past show.
For this and other videos, visit us at http://metanomics.net.
What is a City”Architectural Record (1937)Lewis Mumfor.docxphilipnelson29183
“What is a City?”
Architectural Record (1937)
Lewis Mumford
Editors’ Introduction
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) has been called the United States’ last great public intellectual – that is, a scholar
not based in academia who writes for an educated popular audience. Beginning with the publication of his first
book The Story of Utopias in 1922 and continuing throughout a career that saw the publication of some twenty-
five influential volumes, Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural
history, the history of technology and, preeminently, the history of cities and urban planning practice.
Born in Brooklyn and coming of age at a time when the modern city was reaching a new peak in the history of
urban civilization, Mumford saw the urban experience as an essential component in the development of human
culture and the human personality. He consistently argued that the physical design of cities and their economic
functions were secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human
community. Mumford applied these principles to his architectural criticism for The New Yorker magazine and his
work with the Regional Planning Association of America in the 1920s and 1930s, his campaign against plans to
build a highway through Washington Square in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and his lifelong
championing of the environmental theories of Patrick Geddes and the Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard.
In “What is a City?” – the text of a 1937 talk to an audience of urban planners – Mumford lays out his fundamental
propositions about city planning and the human potential, both individual and social, of urban life. The city, he writes,
is “a theater of social action,” and everything else – art, politics, education, commerce – serve only to make the
“social drama . . . more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of
the actors and the action of the play.” The city as a form of social drama expressed as much in daily life as in
revolutionary moments – it was a theme and an image to which Mumford would return over and over again. In The
Culture of Cities of 1938, he rhapsodized about the artist Albrecht Dürer witnessing a religious procession in
Antwerp in 1519 that was a dramatic performance “where the spectators were also communicants.” And in “The
Urban Drama” from The City in History of 1961, he reflected on the ways that the social life of the ancient city
established a kind of dramatic dialogue “in which common life itself takes on the features of a drama, heightened
by every device of costume and scenery, for the setting itself magnifies the voice and increases the apparent
stature of the actors.” Mumford was quick to point out that the earliest urban dialogue was really a one-way
“monologue of power” from the king to his cowering subjects. Such an absence of true dialogue, he wrote, was
“bound to have a fat.
A Method For Writing Essays About LiteratureHeather Green
A method for writing essays about literature by Paul Headrick | Open .... 009 How To Write An Essay In English Example Writing Academic Essays On .... How To Write a Literature Essay: Poetry (Mr Salles) - YouTube. How To Write Literary Analysis The Literary Essay.
The tie tieds. Capitalism and the artist critique.Ptqk
This text was produced for Offce Party: Multidimensional Spectrum of Voices, a curatorial project by Lorenzo Sandoval with writing by John Holten, María Ptqk, Eirik Sørdal, and Anna-Sophie Springer. Kinderhook-Caracas gallery, Berlin; galería Rosa Santos, Valencia, 2013.
213 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance.docxlorainedeserre
213 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance
Path Dependence, Civic
Culture, and Differential
Government Performance
Robert D. Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy (1993) sought to account for differential performance of
regional governments in terms of culture, and for systemic variance
between north and south in terms of the medieval legacy of civic
norms and networks. At a time when the study of comparative poli
tics seemed increasingly to privilege cross-national analysis, Making
Democracy Work stood out as an important reminder that “compar
ative political research of the broadest philosophical and theoretical
implications can be executed within a single country” (LaPalombara
1993, 550). The study has been hailed as a “stunning breakthrough in
political culture research” (Laitin 1995, 171), contributing to “a
renaissance of political culture” beyond the Italian peninsula in ways
that Banfield’s work did not (e.g., Jackman and Miller 1996). Put
nam’s work made other contributions to comparative inquiry. It
brought the study of Italian politics “back in” and broadened it, pre
cisely at a time when favourite Italian research topics among compar
ativists — such as leftist parties and national trade unions — no longer
seemed to have the old currency. Making Democracy Work further
suggested that, contrary to the view often expressed, Italy’s past need
not always be viewed as a burden. Indeed, it was the use of the past
to explain differential effectiveness in contemporary regional govern
ments that made Putnam’s study an important work. It is, in turn,
path dependence analysis that sharply distinguishes Making Democ
racy Work from its earlier Italian-language version (Putnam, Leonar
di, and Nanetti 1985), adds more lustre to the former, and endows
Putnam’s argument with a strong sense of intellectual closure and a
seemingly flawless protective belt.
Putnam stated some unremarkable findings when he reported that
the medieval monarchical and republican regimes worked differently,
that modern public institutions work better in some parts of Italy than
in others, and that the south has fewer expressions of voluntary joint
or collective efforts than does the north. But for Putnam’s explanation
of these findings to hold, three things must be true. The first is that the
Italian regional experiment was a “natural” experiment, to be
approached in the same way that “a botanist might study plant devel
opment by measuring the growth of genetically identical seeds sown in
different plots” (Putnam 1993, 7, emphasis added). The second is that
patterns of civic culture best explain differential effectiveness in
regions. The third is that these modern social patterns are plainly trace
able to the monarchical and republican regimes of medieval times.
One objective of this chapter is to show that neither logic nor evi
dence bears out such an interpretation. The regional experiment was
hardly a “natural” experiment. ...
Urban Planning And Design Of Urban Cities Essay
Sustainable Cities : A Sustainable City
Lost in the Big City
The, New Jersey City Essay
My Perfect City Essay
What Makes A City?
Descriptive Essay About My City
Persepolis House Essay
Descriptive Essay About A Beautiful City
Essay On City Planners
City Vs Country
Short Essay On A Day In The City
Research Paper On The City Of Ur
City and CountrySide
The Concept Of A Smart City Essay
Character Analysis: The Angled City
A Beautiful City
Descriptive Essay On The City
City vs Country
Descriptive Essay On The City
This short essay is connected to the IKT (IKT - International association of curators of contemporary art) lecture presented in Siena in June 2001, titled "Anatomy of the Swiss Army Knife". This lecture addresses the do's and don't of art in the public realm, and the highly specific tools one needs to cope with the benevolent (or malevolent, for that matter) properties of the public realm in all its intricacies.
DISCUSSION QUESTION PART ONE THE ART OF POLITICS PLEASE ANSWER QU.docxelinoraudley582231
DISCUSSION QUESTION PART ONE THE ART OF POLITICS? PLEASE ANSWER QUESTION & RESPOND TO THE 4 REMARKS FROM OTHERS, COMPLETELY, RELEVANTLY & COMPETENTLY?
Did Florence's political and economic culture create the conditions that made it such a hotbed of brilliant art and science, or did the city's strong humanist thinking shape its politics and economy? What made it so much more successful artistically and culturally than, say, Milan, Rome, or Naples?
On a more lighthearted note in the end: which of the Italian city states would strike you personally as the best place for the era? What are the positives and negatives of the relatively stable but somewhat tyrannical Milan? Elite-led commercial republic of Venice? Guild and commerce -driven Lucca and Florence? Church-centered Rome? Naples with its landed gentry? PLEASE LABLE AND IDENTIFY ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION? PLEASE ANSWER THE QUESTION COMPLETELY?
PLEASE RESPOND TO THE 4 FOLLOWING Remarks OF OTHERS? Please “number” or identify EACH RESPONSE?FLORENTINE LC Florentine LC
1.Affluent Florentines(if am saying this right) became outstanding patrons of art and culture in Italian culture Leon Battista Alberti and others became powerful men who were able to reform architecture and styles of painting which defined the Renaissance period. Even though he was affluent, Leon Alberti was a humanist determined to use his skill to add to the life of ordinary citizens. (Gilmour, 76)
The art of politics and the politics of artPG
2.Florence, with more justification be called an oligarchy. There was also a large class with no political power whatever, the workers, especially those employed by the wool manufacturers. They were not members of any guilds, were forbidden to form guilds of their own, and were the worst sufferers in time of economic depression. They were one of the earliest examples of a modern industrial proletariat. Their discontent might break out from time to time, but they never succeeded in acquiring permanent political status.
Art of PoliticsFJ
3.Florence’s strong humanist thinking shaped the politics and economy. Beginning with Petrarch and bringing humanism into light, the ruling elites of Florence wanted to look to the past Roman and Greek styles of literature, art and architecture to make the present better. Florence ended up being the cultural center of the Renaissance due to the banking empire brought in by the Medici family. As banking continued to soar, the elite became richer and needed to invest in something. Why not flaunt your money by giving money to artists to create works for you? Patronizing the arts became such a large part of the Renaissance, and it was because of the large increase in disposable income by the elites that allowed it to happen. This further led to investments in architecture (like Brunelleschi’s Dome and the doors of the Baptistery). Such a large concentration of capital in Florence led many to flock to the city, such as Leonardo da Vinci. Other cities may have had.
Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna - catalogo della mostraAlessandro Califano, PhD
The exhibition "Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna" - about women-led art galleries in the Sixties and Seventies in Rome - ran at the Library of MACRO Contemporary Art Museum in Rome between 5 March and 15 August 2015.
This e-book, edited by Alessandro Califano and Elisabetta Bianchi, is the catalogue of the exhibition, published two years later. (Language: Italian)
A due anni dall'inaugurazione della mostra "Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna" - tenutasi dal 5 marzo al 15 agosto 2015 presso la biblioteca del MACRO, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, e dedicata alle gallerie d'arte romane dirette o fondate da donne negli anni Sessanta e Settanta - vede finalmente la luce, a cura di Alessandro Califano ed Elisabetta Bianchi, il catalogo digitale ad essa dedicato.
Museums' Role in Fostering and Managing Geographically Related Cultural Herit...Alessandro Califano, PhD
This presentation has been prepared for the Muzeum @ Digit Conference 2016 at the Hungarian National Museum (Budapest, 22-23 November 2016). It describes an open source solution - as are those proposed and fostered by OSACA, the Open Source Alliance of Central Asia, founded in Kabul in October 2011 - to map and manage a knowledge base related to both governmental mining prospects and cultural heritage protection. Though based on case studies located in Afghanistan, this solution would be well suited for being applied in many different contexts, too.
The Bactria Cultural Centre. A Unesco sponsored project, in Mazar-e Sharif, w...Alessandro Califano, PhD
"The Bactria Cultural Centre. A Unesco sponsored project, in Mazar-e Sharif, war-struck northern Afghanistan – Success or Failure?" was written for the e-conservation magazine's (since 2013: e-conservation journal) 17th issue, in 2010 (pp.64-70). A text only version is still available online, but the one uploaded here, though a draft, has also all pictures embedded, so I think it might be interesting to read, as well.
More Related Content
Similar to Kafka at the museum - OR - Why I'm NOT a friend of foundations for Italian museums
Metanomics is a weekly Web-based show on the serious uses of virtual worlds. This transcript is from a past show.
For this and other videos, visit us at http://metanomics.net.
What is a City”Architectural Record (1937)Lewis Mumfor.docxphilipnelson29183
“What is a City?”
Architectural Record (1937)
Lewis Mumford
Editors’ Introduction
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) has been called the United States’ last great public intellectual – that is, a scholar
not based in academia who writes for an educated popular audience. Beginning with the publication of his first
book The Story of Utopias in 1922 and continuing throughout a career that saw the publication of some twenty-
five influential volumes, Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural
history, the history of technology and, preeminently, the history of cities and urban planning practice.
Born in Brooklyn and coming of age at a time when the modern city was reaching a new peak in the history of
urban civilization, Mumford saw the urban experience as an essential component in the development of human
culture and the human personality. He consistently argued that the physical design of cities and their economic
functions were secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human
community. Mumford applied these principles to his architectural criticism for The New Yorker magazine and his
work with the Regional Planning Association of America in the 1920s and 1930s, his campaign against plans to
build a highway through Washington Square in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and his lifelong
championing of the environmental theories of Patrick Geddes and the Garden City ideals of Ebenezer Howard.
In “What is a City?” – the text of a 1937 talk to an audience of urban planners – Mumford lays out his fundamental
propositions about city planning and the human potential, both individual and social, of urban life. The city, he writes,
is “a theater of social action,” and everything else – art, politics, education, commerce – serve only to make the
“social drama . . . more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of
the actors and the action of the play.” The city as a form of social drama expressed as much in daily life as in
revolutionary moments – it was a theme and an image to which Mumford would return over and over again. In The
Culture of Cities of 1938, he rhapsodized about the artist Albrecht Dürer witnessing a religious procession in
Antwerp in 1519 that was a dramatic performance “where the spectators were also communicants.” And in “The
Urban Drama” from The City in History of 1961, he reflected on the ways that the social life of the ancient city
established a kind of dramatic dialogue “in which common life itself takes on the features of a drama, heightened
by every device of costume and scenery, for the setting itself magnifies the voice and increases the apparent
stature of the actors.” Mumford was quick to point out that the earliest urban dialogue was really a one-way
“monologue of power” from the king to his cowering subjects. Such an absence of true dialogue, he wrote, was
“bound to have a fat.
A Method For Writing Essays About LiteratureHeather Green
A method for writing essays about literature by Paul Headrick | Open .... 009 How To Write An Essay In English Example Writing Academic Essays On .... How To Write a Literature Essay: Poetry (Mr Salles) - YouTube. How To Write Literary Analysis The Literary Essay.
The tie tieds. Capitalism and the artist critique.Ptqk
This text was produced for Offce Party: Multidimensional Spectrum of Voices, a curatorial project by Lorenzo Sandoval with writing by John Holten, María Ptqk, Eirik Sørdal, and Anna-Sophie Springer. Kinderhook-Caracas gallery, Berlin; galería Rosa Santos, Valencia, 2013.
213 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance.docxlorainedeserre
213 Path Dependence, Civic Culture, Government Performance
Path Dependence, Civic
Culture, and Differential
Government Performance
Robert D. Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy (1993) sought to account for differential performance of
regional governments in terms of culture, and for systemic variance
between north and south in terms of the medieval legacy of civic
norms and networks. At a time when the study of comparative poli
tics seemed increasingly to privilege cross-national analysis, Making
Democracy Work stood out as an important reminder that “compar
ative political research of the broadest philosophical and theoretical
implications can be executed within a single country” (LaPalombara
1993, 550). The study has been hailed as a “stunning breakthrough in
political culture research” (Laitin 1995, 171), contributing to “a
renaissance of political culture” beyond the Italian peninsula in ways
that Banfield’s work did not (e.g., Jackman and Miller 1996). Put
nam’s work made other contributions to comparative inquiry. It
brought the study of Italian politics “back in” and broadened it, pre
cisely at a time when favourite Italian research topics among compar
ativists — such as leftist parties and national trade unions — no longer
seemed to have the old currency. Making Democracy Work further
suggested that, contrary to the view often expressed, Italy’s past need
not always be viewed as a burden. Indeed, it was the use of the past
to explain differential effectiveness in contemporary regional govern
ments that made Putnam’s study an important work. It is, in turn,
path dependence analysis that sharply distinguishes Making Democ
racy Work from its earlier Italian-language version (Putnam, Leonar
di, and Nanetti 1985), adds more lustre to the former, and endows
Putnam’s argument with a strong sense of intellectual closure and a
seemingly flawless protective belt.
Putnam stated some unremarkable findings when he reported that
the medieval monarchical and republican regimes worked differently,
that modern public institutions work better in some parts of Italy than
in others, and that the south has fewer expressions of voluntary joint
or collective efforts than does the north. But for Putnam’s explanation
of these findings to hold, three things must be true. The first is that the
Italian regional experiment was a “natural” experiment, to be
approached in the same way that “a botanist might study plant devel
opment by measuring the growth of genetically identical seeds sown in
different plots” (Putnam 1993, 7, emphasis added). The second is that
patterns of civic culture best explain differential effectiveness in
regions. The third is that these modern social patterns are plainly trace
able to the monarchical and republican regimes of medieval times.
One objective of this chapter is to show that neither logic nor evi
dence bears out such an interpretation. The regional experiment was
hardly a “natural” experiment. ...
Urban Planning And Design Of Urban Cities Essay
Sustainable Cities : A Sustainable City
Lost in the Big City
The, New Jersey City Essay
My Perfect City Essay
What Makes A City?
Descriptive Essay About My City
Persepolis House Essay
Descriptive Essay About A Beautiful City
Essay On City Planners
City Vs Country
Short Essay On A Day In The City
Research Paper On The City Of Ur
City and CountrySide
The Concept Of A Smart City Essay
Character Analysis: The Angled City
A Beautiful City
Descriptive Essay On The City
City vs Country
Descriptive Essay On The City
This short essay is connected to the IKT (IKT - International association of curators of contemporary art) lecture presented in Siena in June 2001, titled "Anatomy of the Swiss Army Knife". This lecture addresses the do's and don't of art in the public realm, and the highly specific tools one needs to cope with the benevolent (or malevolent, for that matter) properties of the public realm in all its intricacies.
DISCUSSION QUESTION PART ONE THE ART OF POLITICS PLEASE ANSWER QU.docxelinoraudley582231
DISCUSSION QUESTION PART ONE THE ART OF POLITICS? PLEASE ANSWER QUESTION & RESPOND TO THE 4 REMARKS FROM OTHERS, COMPLETELY, RELEVANTLY & COMPETENTLY?
Did Florence's political and economic culture create the conditions that made it such a hotbed of brilliant art and science, or did the city's strong humanist thinking shape its politics and economy? What made it so much more successful artistically and culturally than, say, Milan, Rome, or Naples?
On a more lighthearted note in the end: which of the Italian city states would strike you personally as the best place for the era? What are the positives and negatives of the relatively stable but somewhat tyrannical Milan? Elite-led commercial republic of Venice? Guild and commerce -driven Lucca and Florence? Church-centered Rome? Naples with its landed gentry? PLEASE LABLE AND IDENTIFY ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION? PLEASE ANSWER THE QUESTION COMPLETELY?
PLEASE RESPOND TO THE 4 FOLLOWING Remarks OF OTHERS? Please “number” or identify EACH RESPONSE?FLORENTINE LC Florentine LC
1.Affluent Florentines(if am saying this right) became outstanding patrons of art and culture in Italian culture Leon Battista Alberti and others became powerful men who were able to reform architecture and styles of painting which defined the Renaissance period. Even though he was affluent, Leon Alberti was a humanist determined to use his skill to add to the life of ordinary citizens. (Gilmour, 76)
The art of politics and the politics of artPG
2.Florence, with more justification be called an oligarchy. There was also a large class with no political power whatever, the workers, especially those employed by the wool manufacturers. They were not members of any guilds, were forbidden to form guilds of their own, and were the worst sufferers in time of economic depression. They were one of the earliest examples of a modern industrial proletariat. Their discontent might break out from time to time, but they never succeeded in acquiring permanent political status.
Art of PoliticsFJ
3.Florence’s strong humanist thinking shaped the politics and economy. Beginning with Petrarch and bringing humanism into light, the ruling elites of Florence wanted to look to the past Roman and Greek styles of literature, art and architecture to make the present better. Florence ended up being the cultural center of the Renaissance due to the banking empire brought in by the Medici family. As banking continued to soar, the elite became richer and needed to invest in something. Why not flaunt your money by giving money to artists to create works for you? Patronizing the arts became such a large part of the Renaissance, and it was because of the large increase in disposable income by the elites that allowed it to happen. This further led to investments in architecture (like Brunelleschi’s Dome and the doors of the Baptistery). Such a large concentration of capital in Florence led many to flock to the city, such as Leonardo da Vinci. Other cities may have had.
Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna - catalogo della mostraAlessandro Califano, PhD
The exhibition "Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna" - about women-led art galleries in the Sixties and Seventies in Rome - ran at the Library of MACRO Contemporary Art Museum in Rome between 5 March and 15 August 2015.
This e-book, edited by Alessandro Califano and Elisabetta Bianchi, is the catalogue of the exhibition, published two years later. (Language: Italian)
A due anni dall'inaugurazione della mostra "Fondo gallerie storiche romane - Destinazione Donna" - tenutasi dal 5 marzo al 15 agosto 2015 presso la biblioteca del MACRO, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, e dedicata alle gallerie d'arte romane dirette o fondate da donne negli anni Sessanta e Settanta - vede finalmente la luce, a cura di Alessandro Califano ed Elisabetta Bianchi, il catalogo digitale ad essa dedicato.
Museums' Role in Fostering and Managing Geographically Related Cultural Herit...Alessandro Califano, PhD
This presentation has been prepared for the Muzeum @ Digit Conference 2016 at the Hungarian National Museum (Budapest, 22-23 November 2016). It describes an open source solution - as are those proposed and fostered by OSACA, the Open Source Alliance of Central Asia, founded in Kabul in October 2011 - to map and manage a knowledge base related to both governmental mining prospects and cultural heritage protection. Though based on case studies located in Afghanistan, this solution would be well suited for being applied in many different contexts, too.
The Bactria Cultural Centre. A Unesco sponsored project, in Mazar-e Sharif, w...Alessandro Califano, PhD
"The Bactria Cultural Centre. A Unesco sponsored project, in Mazar-e Sharif, war-struck northern Afghanistan – Success or Failure?" was written for the e-conservation magazine's (since 2013: e-conservation journal) 17th issue, in 2010 (pp.64-70). A text only version is still available online, but the one uploaded here, though a draft, has also all pictures embedded, so I think it might be interesting to read, as well.
60 su 80 : Sergio Pucci fotografo - Introduzione alla mostra (MACRO, Roma 2014)Alessandro Califano, PhD
An introductory remark to the exhibition "60 out of 80: Sergio Pucci, photographer" that opened at the Library of MACRO contemporary art museum (Rome, Italy) on 14 Oct. 2014. Text in Italian by Alessandro Califano. Keywords are: the changing role of museum professionals, democratic curatorship, community involvement, and, of course, photography
This presentation has been prepared for CMA 2014, the Canadian Museums Association's yearly meeting taking place in Toronto from 7-11 April 2014. It focuses on inclusion of audience as co-curators and co-creators of added value to museums collections, on digital engagement (Jasper Visser & Jim Richardson) and "stepping down" from curators as opinion makers/leaders, to focus towards museums (and museum professionals) as enzymes of under-the-surface-lying creativity in the communities they wish to address, facilitators for new values and new visions to emerge. The presentation, quoting case studies from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Italy (the Visual Arts Research and Documentation Centre at MACRO Contemporary Art Museum), was discussed on April 10, 2014 at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel (Imperial Room).
This presentation has been prepared for the Canadian Museums Association 2013 Conference in Whitehorse, Yukon (Canada), and presented on 30 May 2013. Next to addressing the varied setting of Afghanistan's complex cultural stratigraphy, it describes a few case studies of successful and not-so-successful endeavours in the area, stressing the need of an extreme flexibility in setting up a cooperation between museum professionals. This flexibility shoul not be just confined to the tools we choose, but should also englobe our values, strategies, and priorities. In this way, we'll be able to break the dichotomy of "giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day" or "teaching a man to fish and feed him for a life": going out to fish together for a while, each one will come back enriched from the interaction.
Learning from mistakes - Cultural Heritage Crisis Management in Post-Disaster...Alessandro Califano, PhD
Learning From Mistakes describes a new strategic approach to post disaster cultural heritage crisis management, focusing on the experience drawn from the two earthquakes that hit Italy in 2009 and 2012. Crowdsourcing, FOSS, and local broadcasting points are suggested for sharing knowledge and streamlining intervention in a more effective way. First presented in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, at ROSCCA 2013 (25-29 March 2013) in a slightly differing version, this presentation was shown at MuseumNext 2013 in Amsterdam (NL) on 13 May 2013.
Rome's Visual Arts Research & Documentation Centre - located at MACRo museum - hosts over 140 archival units of a rare manuscripts fund by Italian artist Enrico Prampolini. The present document describes some preventive conservation issues, technical solutions, and standards to proceed to a full digitization of this fund. An English edition of this document will be posted soon.
This pilot project, inspired by a collection data management developed for a museum in Rotterdam, has been developed at crdav, the Research & Documentation Centre for Visual Arts of Rome's Cultural Heritage Department. It was used as a basis for a presentation at CDCH 2012, a Satellite Workshop of IEEE's Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing in Innsbruck, Austria (30 September - 4 October 2012).
This presentation has been prepared on 8 March 2012 for the photographic section of the exhibition "Un cammino di colori lungo la Via della Seta" (The Silkroad - a colourful thread), taking part to the XXVII Week of Scientific and Technologic Culture organized by MUSIS (Rome's network of scientific university museums) with an exhibition focused on women and Central Asia and hosted by the cultural association "Lignarius" in Rome from 10 to 22 March 2012.
In times of "lean economy" museums and other cultural heritage related institutions and programmes must come up with a maximum of creativity and strategic thinking to obtain the most from as little as might be available. In this presentation - first shown on 13 November 2011 at the Digital Youth of Central Asia Forum in Dushanbe via video conference on Skype, some possible approaches to the issue are discussed, while hinting at the roots of the problem - way back in the mid Eighties - when public programming failed to keep private sponsors from investing in large, expensive, but prevalently ephemeral projects.
Presented at Asolo's ArtFilmFestival 2011 on 23 August, this paper (in Italian) deals with the issue of obsolescence of digital documentation in museums (and beyond them...). A presentation, running under a similar title has been now uploaded in an English translation here on SlideShare.
The original version of this presentation has been presented in Italian at the ArtFilmFestival 2011 in Asolo (Italy), on 23 August 2011, together with the paper "Musei Domani - Lo spettro della memoria" - posted as well here on SlideShare.
Focus of this presentation (and of the related document) is: what are we going to do with our fading (digital) documentation of museums' (or libraries', or archives') collections?
Budget cuts are no longer to be considered a merely temporary accident, so we have to face the fact that ours is now a post-affluent society, where vast primadonna-like museal programmes (and architectures) are going to be a thing of the past, and sustainability, as well as vernacular architectures, are the things we should take into focus.
This also means downsizing infrastructures and tools. In documentation and communication - of single artefacts, collections, and museum programmes - we can consider the role of humbler (and less expensive) tools.
Like social upheaval’ dissemination in the Maghreb and in the Middle East has effectively demonstrated, a smartphone can be a very powerful tool. If we think of the fact that museum professionals are very often already networked, we can easily imagine a new, “lighter” and less expensive process of collections’ documentation, based on already existing know-how.
This presentation has been prepared for a meeting organized by ICOM and the City of Bologna Museums Authority, focused on the preservation of virtual memories (19 May 2011). Further details about the meeting can be found on twitter at #memorievirtuali.
If not stated otherwise, all pictures are by the author.
Museums - A Risk Assessment of MACRO's New Annex in Rome: Theoretical PremisesAlessandro Califano, PhD
First posted to my MuseumStudies blog on Tumblr yesterday (18 Jabuary 2011), this text draws the theoretical background to an in-depth risk assessment of MACRO's new Annex, opened to the public in Rome on 3 December 2010.
Virtual, digital, immaterial. Documentation, conservation and contemporary artAlessandro Califano, PhD
Technology, a factor coming more and more into play today in contemporary art, could at first sight be considered as a facilitating element. That this is not completely true - and that contemporary art museum professionals are faced by new and challenging issues - is the theme of this essay. Written in 2005, and only slightly revised for today's publication of Slide Share, it still presents some usable options to try and cope with them.
This document is my first draft of two texts that are going to appear in a volume dedicated to the architecture in the Sixties in Rome, as illustrated by pictures of Oscar Savio. now in CRDAV’s Collections.
The volume will be published by Electa (Mondadori, Milan). It should be out for sale in just a few months.
Transcription of four posters (text is both in English and Dari/Farsi) prepared for the UNESCO sponsored “Ghazni, Capital of Islamic Civilization: 3000 Years of History” exhibition, running at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul since 15 September 2010.
The Legacy of a Humanistic Tradition in Roberto Rossellini’s Films and Research Work. Pictures taken from the art book-catalogue presented at the exhibition shown at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere (Rome, IT), 10 February – 1 April 2007.
The exhibition marked the final celebrations for Roberto Rossellini’s centenary, and underlined some of the lesser known aspects of the Italian film director’s research work and filmography.
The exhibition was structured in multiple sections. One of these showed a selection of pictures shot by Italian movie stills photographer Gianni Assenza.
This presentation is the revised English version of a previous one, prepared by the same author for CRDAV on July 12, 2010.
Project and Layout by Alessandro Califano,
Senior Curator at CRDAV - 27 September 2010.
This presentation has been prepared for the exhibition “Ghazni, Capital of Islamic Civilization: 3000 Years of History”, sponsored by UNESCO and running at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul from 15 September 2010, in preparation of the 2013 Ghazni-event.
Curator: Dr. Alessandro Califano, UNESCO Cultural Consultant
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Kafka at the museum - OR - Why I'm NOT a friend of foundations for Italian museums
1. KAFKA AT THE M U SE U M , A T R U E I N SI D E ST O R Y
by Alessandro Califano
Launched on 4 July 2011 at MACRO to present to the media the museum’s new director,
Mr. Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, succeeding to Mr. Luca Massimo Barbero, yesterday’s press
conference has been interesting for some of what has been said, as well as for some that
hasn’t - and also, maybe, for the absence of some of the participants being expected: the
Mayor of Rome, Alemanno, and the Manager of the City’s Cultural Heritage Department,
Mr. Broccoli, who were announced, but both did not come.
They sent their greetings, of course – everybody does, why shouldn’t they? – but basically
it’s been a two-men-show: Mr. Pietromarchi himself, and Mr. Dino Gasperini, Deputy
Mayor of Rome, in charge of the city’s cultural heritage, and of its historical downtown
area. Mr. Gasperini introduced the absence of the Head of the Cultural Heritage
Department, assuring that his staff, however, was present au complet – to which half of the
first row uneasily stirred, grinned, and somewhat sheepishly nodded.
Much has been said, described, and promised – as is usual in such settings: to wrap it all
up in brief, cultural programmes are part politics, part funds, but often, there’s lots of blah-
blah involved, as well. Who cares for a sketchy description of the event might be interested
in looking under hash-tag “#MACRO” at my tweets about the conference, yesterday.
Here, however, I’d like to focus not so much on the formal investiture of the new director -
Mr. Gasperini said he felt honoured presenting to the city such a high calibre figure as the
new director, and also a little awed, if he compared the director’s cv to his own (and rightly
so, I daresay: Gasperini’s official CV ON THE City Council’s web site merely mentions that
he has been the Christian Democratic party secretary in the S. Saba rione of Rome as a 19-
years-old lad, and a few other political milestones – really not too much to explain why
he’s been chosen to politically represent and guide the cultural heritage policies of a city
like Rome) – but rather on the funding (mis?)procedures assuring a budget to MACRO.
MACRO’s new Director, Mr. Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, started his opening remarks
mentioning the prestigious new structures recently added to the already existing ones in
Rome, the new MACRO Annex and MAXXI being the top two new entries, and the ticking
swing on Rome’s contemporary art scene. It was the best moment, perhaps – he said – to
catch the (perfect?) wave, picking up the challenge and connecting all stakeholders
involved in this sector.
True, it seems to me that almost everyone else, except those having heavy petrodollars to
back them, is slowly sobering up from the pre-2008 prima-donna architects’ extravaganzas
– but Rome, as an old lady, is perhaps entitled on being a bit slower on catching up trends.
2. Anyway, Pietromarchi explained that MACRO would be certainly up to quickly respond to
signals, blending them on the international scene, opening up to the local community, and
merging with different approaches. Though he didn’t draw a full agenda for the museum,
yet, he mentioned that his idea of cultural policies and the role of the museum was one of
integration, of its being a hub – focusing on comparison, education, and production – to
support the artists’ community.
That’s not a bad idea, at all I’d say. Inclusiveness and networking are something I’m always
ready to strongly approve and support. The problem is – since “the devil is in the details”
as Aby Warburg liked to say – how you do that. Speaking of collective trends and high-
flying goals is quite OK. Mentioning the need to quickly proceed setting up a Foundation
“as an universally well known tool that cannot be renounced, in order to act quickly and
effectively also towards private citizens, even imposing one’s own cultural agenda”, on
the other hand, sounds much less convincing.
Sure, it may be good and proper for a Foundation – especially a private one, marked by
private funds and a (relative) control by a public establishment. But I’m really not sure if a
museum should feel represented by such a mission. For all I know, a museum still is “a
non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to
the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible
and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education,
study and enjoyment”, as it has been defined by ICOM at its 21st General Conference in
Vienna, Austria, in 2007…
However, Kafka’s Türhüterlegende (“Before the Law”, 1915) truly came to my mind only
after Mr. Pietromarchi had finished describing the setting where the museum was going to
hatch, and word had been given to the media.
Among the questions asked by journalists – since it was of almost general knowledge that
the previous Director of MACRO, Luca Massimo Barbero, had resigned after months of
financial stand-by and uncertainty – one of the first was about the budget. How come, it
was asked, that the City Board was ready to approve that very night the budget – as Deputy
Mayor Gasperini had just announced – and to draw the museum institution decree, and
the charters of services provided and quality as well, assured to be completed by the end of
the month? How was this sudden change of pace to be explained, since that very same
Board had seemed to have been almost missing in action during the long previous months
that forced Mr. Barbero to resign?
To this, Mr. Gasperini gave basically three answers. First of all, he recalled having stepped
into office only in mid-January this year, so he was not responsible for what had or had not
been previously done by his predecessor. This is only half true, since Rome’s Mayor, and a
vast part of the City Board Mr. Gasperini is part of, remained the same.
3. Second, he stressed that funds had been eventually provided, after all, so Mr. Barbero
should have just waited a little more and he would have got them. This, precisely, was the
point that reminded me of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, and it might be useful to quote here
the plot’s summary (from Wikipedia): “A man from the country seeks the law and wishes
to gain entry to the law through a doorway. The doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot
go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the
doorkeeper says that is possible. The man waits by the door for years, […] until he is
about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone
seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers ‘No one else
could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to
shut it.’ ”. Commenting this, in the context we are talking about, appears superfluous…
As his third answer, Mr. Gasperini, said – with a certain compunction – that the City
Board had to cope with the large overspending the previous Board, lead by Mayor Veltroni,
had left as a burdensome heredity to the present one. I must here admit that I’m not
particularly near to the previous Mayor’s policies. On the contrary, I found him personally
rather “lightweight”, and many policies of his Board frankly fanciful. That said – and
without even taking into account the quite debated truthfulness of that overspending – I
think that using this issue as an alibi, after three years of the present City Board being in
charge (and having been lavishly granted previously unheard of extraordinary funds by the
central government in the meantime), means either to be telling a flat out lie – or to
confess the present Board is utterly inapt as a public manager. Both of which might easily
apply, I guess.
So, in order to “put Lenin back on his feet”, as Rudi Dutschke might have said in this
context – or to put Kafka back on the bookshelf, and out of the museum – let us now here
comment the present setting, how we came to it, and what the future (just maybe, but the
likelihood thereof is quite strong) could keep in stock for the contemporary art-and-
museum scene in Rome. The roots of the Changing of the Guard that brought the City
Board to miss the approval date for the budget (usually set for the 31 December of each
year – but last year’s budget had been approved with months’ long delay as well) sink
indeed deeply into the shaky terrain of Italy’s politics.
When the co-founder of Berlusconi’s governing party – Gianfranco Fini – abandoned the
primary incorporator in early November 2010, the destinies of the depreciated regime of
the old, unfit media-tycoon seemed to be written down in block letters. However, the
decision to wait for a full month before the Parliament could vote for or against the motion
of no confidence, left time enough for tempers to rise, and for the Government to bring on
its side – with tangibly convincing arguments – MPs enough to pass the crisis.
Rome’s Mayor, Alemanno – a “heavy” ally of Berlusconi, though originally belonging to the
same post-Fascist political area as Fini – had now to reassess the City Board’s situation,
since previous allies might now be less reliable as they were considered being before. One
4. of these was certainly his Deputy Mayor Umberto Croppi, in charge of the city’s cultural
heritage, and of communication. A wide-travelled, experienced and bright professional,
Mr. Croppi – who had been in charge of the winning electoral campaign of Alemanno in
2008 – was a rather atypical right-wing representative, and ideally contiguous to
Gianfranco Fini’s political line, whose new party Futuro e Libertà (“Future and Freedom”)
he had joined in November 2010.
A long uncertain moment followed also at City government’s level, and this made the
preparation of following year’s budget (always an occasion for intensive chaffers) a
particularly unfeasible option. The situation changed after Mr. Alemanno went to visit
Berlusconi at his residence in Palazzo Grazioli. Now, why on Earth a Mayor should ask a
Prime Minister for assent (or was it permission?) before reorganizing his staff and Board is
a glorious mystery only to be properly understood in some tribal setting… or among the
Sopranos.
But so far, so good. Early in January this year, the Mayor asked the whole Board to resign,
proceeding afterwards to hand out the delegated charges to a new Board, from which –
Hocus-Pocus! – Mr. Croppi was excluded, while in came Mr. Gasperini, from Berlusconi’s
party area. Resisting, as an earthen pot among iron ones, was probably to be considered
unlikely from start for Luca Massimo Barbero, previously placed at the head of MACRO by
Mr. Croppi himself. After a few months of vain promises and tight purse’s strings, Barbero
was de facto forced to resign.
So, now MACRO has a new director, probably a new budget – though a reduced one:
around 2 M € of the approximately 5 M € of estimated budget needed (but a very late
budget helps out – you only need to cover half a year’s expenses) – and a strong strive
towards the institution of a new ad hoc Foundation to run the museum. As I’ve already
mentioned above, I’m not at all convinced of the last one’s advisability. Foundations have
been proved to be very useful tools for taking care of a certain mission – also a cultural
heritage related one – endowed by individuals, families, or organizations. However, they
are intrinsically very opaque institutions, having pretty few requirements set by existing
Italian laws. There is no duty to present a full budget, for one – explaining where one’s
money comes from, for instance – since this could mean disclosing sensitive data, e.g.
about a sponsor’s ideological preferences.
No wonder Italian parties have been using foundations since at least 1998 to promote their
cultural activities – there’s a rich variety of internal jobs to assign and harvest, and the
freedom of its internal organization is almost uncontrolled. There is nothing to prevent a
foundation to disclose data like who paid for what, of course – but to shift from a public,
relatively transparent institution like a municipal art museum to a semi-private (funds to
run MACRO’s Foundation would be mostly private) and largely opaque one, relying on the
fair play of boards and individuals, doesn’t seem to be a particularly clever idea.
Or is it, just maybe, too clever?