Florida Lawyer Blows Up Communist Statues, Egypt’s New Mega-Mummy Museum, London’s National Gallery Revamp, and More: Morning Links for August 6, 2024

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THE HEADLINES

COMMUNISM LIVES! A Florida lawyer called Christopher Rodriguez has pleaded guilty to bombing and shooting a statue of late communist leaders Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin in Texas. Not only this, but Rodriguez also admitted to taking a pot shot at the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. a year later. In 2022, he rented a car and drove 850 miles from his home in Panama City to San Antonio, where the statue – titled Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head (2009) – is located. He scaled a fence to gain access to the 21-foot-tall, 4,400-pound artwork by dissident Chinese artist duo the Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang) before blowing up two gas canisters laden with explosives at its base, while also shooting at it with a rifle. A few months later, Rodriguez journeyed to the US capital, placed a bag of explosives next to the rear wall of the Chinese Embassy, but failed to detonate them. In an email sent to the San Antonio Reporter when the work was erected, the Goa Brothers said “they hope freedom-loving Texan people will enjoy the sculpture.”

MUSEUM FOR MUMMIES. New photos have emerged detailing Egypt’s colossal Giza Museum, a new, 100,000-square-foot structure currently being built to house more than 100,000 antiquities, including treasures from King Tutankhamun’s tomb. The museum is near the country’s iconic pyramids and is being funded by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. Around 5,000 pharaonic artifacts are being relocated from a museum in Cairo, while many of the objects to be displayed haven’t been seen by the public since being discovered in 1922. Giza Museum’s showstoppers will include King Tut’s golden sarcophagus and a 3,200-year-old sculpture of pharaoh Rameses II, which will hold court near the museum’s main staircase. A ritual boat, aka “solar barge,” called the Khufu ship, which was buried next to the Great Pyramid in 2,5000 BCE, will also be on show. Several political and economic setbacks have delayed its opening, but when the museum does open its doors (hopefully at the end of this year), it will steal the title of world’s biggest museum from the Louvre in Paris.

THE DIGEST

Team Great Britain’s official artist at the Olympics in Paris is hoping to immortalize the nation’s medal-winners by painting “historical documents.” Ben Mosley is portraying the athletes in real time, which he described as a “marathon and an honor.” He said he hoped the artworks would become “collector’s items for enthusiasts in the future.” [BBC]

Should the British public demand free admission to the permanent collections of all government-funded museums in the UK? One reader from the Guardian seems to think so. But what about non-UK citizens? Well, they should obviously pay, writes (Brit) Carol Varlaam.  [Guardian]

The sport of cycling… just a load of guys and gals having fun and wearing spandex? Apparently not. It’s chafing hell if Belgian sports photographer Kristof Ramon’s snaps are anything to go by. Just reading his new book, “The Art of Suffering: Capturing the Brutal Beauty of Road Cycling,” is enough to give one a sweaty, abraded nether region. [Creative Boom]

Want to know how London’s National Gallery is planning to rehang 1,100 works by 400 artists as part of the museum’s massive refurb to mark its 200th birthday? You’ll have to wait until May 2025 for its grand reopening. “We are decanting everything and rehanging everywhere,” Christine Riding, the museum’s director of collections and research, said. “So that’s 65 galleries on the main floor, it’s a huge undertaking.” [The Art Newspaper]

THE KICKER

CLASS WAR. A museum in the UK has asked the eternal question: is today’s civilization classier than the Romans? The Roman Verulamium Museum in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, is putting the question to its visitors – asking them to consider their own behavior and assumptions compared with the ancient culture. “Romans usually showed their class and status through their occupation, their possessions, and their property, which is just the same as modern British society,” curator Andrew Deathe said. He has created seven pairs of imagined Roman citizens to interrogate how they elevated or lowered their status, including “a couple of teenage tear-aways stealing statues from a temple.” One of the girls is a Roman citizen, while the other a “free-born British girl,” meaning they would have been treated differently by the law at the time. Deathe said he hopes the exhibition will encourage visitors “to think about how we view class today.” [BBC]