Constructivist drawings stolen in Russia

More woes for Russian cultural heritage:

Hundreds of drawings by the late Russian avant-garde architect Yakov Chernikhov have gone missing. . .

The theft was reported a week after the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg revealed that 221 of its items, valued at $5m (£2.67m), had been stolen.

The Chernikhov drawings were stolen from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. The body overseeing Russian cultural heritage said 274 of them had already been recovered. They were found in Russia and abroad.

The search for the missing items was prompted by the appearance of nine of the sketches at an auction at Christie's in London in June.

From the BBC.

Pen show in DC this weekend

Posting will be light to nonexistent through the weekend; I'm off to the Washington area for the annual pen show at Tysons Corner. The show website is here, for those of a stylophilistic bent.

Thacian dagger and jewelry

A 6-inch-long gold and platinum dagger believed to be 5,000 years-old has been unearthed in central Bulgaria, the archaeologist leading the excavations said Monday.

Archaeologist Martin Hristov said his team discovered more than 500 tiny golden rings that appeared to be pieces of ancient jewelry.

From Discovery News. The find had been reported last week, but this article has more detail and a picture.

A booming market for phones . . .

. . . in Iraq. The NY Times reports:

The cool kids in Iraq all want an Apache, the cellphone they’ve named after an American military helicopter. Next on the scale of hipness comes a Humvee, followed by the Afendi, a Turkish word for dapper, and a sturdy, rounded Nokia known as the Allawi — a reference to the stocky former prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Even more telling are the text messages and images that Iraqis share over their phones. . .

One of the most popular messages making the rounds appears onscreen with the image of a skeleton. “Your call cannot be completed,” it says, “because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

Spin vs counterspin: reality TV hits the battlefield

It's so difficult to figure what is going on in the midst of battle: so much conflicting information, incomplete information, and outright disinformation -- not to mention all the dizzying varieties of spin applied on top.

For battlefield victories aren't enough any more: wars must now be won in the field of public opinion -- as this article illustrates:

THE most important equipment Israeli commandos took with them in a daring weekend raid in the Lebanese city of Tyre may have been video cameras.

In the wake of successful efforts by Hezbollah to film their attacks on Israeli outposts in order to promote their fighting image among friend and foe, the Israelis have accepted they are involved in a war in which image is no less important than substance. . .

The need for such authentication was demonstrated in the aftermath of the Tyre raid, when a BBC journalist stationed there reported as fact what Hezbollah had told him -- that the raiders had landed by helicopter "and walked right into a Hezbollah ambush".

A few hours later, Israel released videos showing the raiders, a naval commando unit, stealthily approaching the apartment building that was their target and surrounding it before dawn . . .

Misunderstood art, misunderstood guides

Today's NY Times has an article on the Guggenheim's gallery guides, who float around the galleries and engage visitors in a sort of informal and ad hoc educational program. The article notes that the program is unique among New York City museums, but it is hardly so nationwide. And outside of museums, volunteer guides routinely buttonhole unsuspecting visitors at zoos, botanical gardens, historic houses, and the like.

An interesting twist on a sentiment expressed by one of the guides interviewed ("Some people are really angry at contemporary art") comes from Ann Althouse, writing over at Instapundit, whose own writeup betrays more than a touch of the negative in jumping to the conclusion that the Guggenheim is trying to pull something over on its patrons:

So the modern art keeps pissing people off, and they've hired people to pass as ordinary museum-goers and try to manage the mood.

But while the guides aren't in uniform, there's never any doubt they are museum employees: they prominently wear their museum ID cards, along with glaring green "Gallery Guide" badges.

There's certainly enough unwarranted pretension in contemporary art, and much of it is excessively self-referential or deliberately obscure. But the fact is that museum visitors themselves often need a bit of help, in that many haven't learned -- or have forgotten how -- to look. It's as much a matter of impatience as anything else, though overly rigid preconceptions about art can get in the way, too.