Tomb of the McMummies

Tomb of the McMummies: an exhibit by artist Beneverywhere, featuring a life-sized mummy and other weird stuff made out of McDonalds food. (hat tip to Patrick Crowley for this one!)

Squid Ink at the LA Weekly interviewed him about the piece:

SI: Why McDonald's and not, say, In-N-Out?
BC: McDonald's is more iconic and has a rich lexicon of symbols, kind of like hieroglyphs in a way. It could really be about any fast food place. I personally doubt the food is much different from place to place.
SI: Can you describe the mummy construction process?
BC: The food was dried out first, then run through a blender, mixed with resin, packed into rubber molds that I made beforehand, and finally the cast pieces were bonded together with more of the mixture and cleaned up.
SI: Where does a person keep this sort of thing -- and what are you planning on doing with it exactly?
BC: Right now it's in storage covered with air hoses and other tools. For now I'm going to display it as part of a larger art show about McDonald's and Egypt. Eventually though, I'd like to find a buyer for it -- like Ripley's, Charlie Sheen, or somebody who might enjoy it.

Be careful, the mummy's got friends.

See more after the jump.

Lego Terracotta Army: in Chalk

A LEGO terracotta army somehow got buried in Sarasota, Florida. It was excavated in November by Dutch street artist Leon Keer.

Here's a couple 'making of' clips that explain the epic trompe l'œil. It's the latest part of the evolving mythos of mysterious giant Lego maker Ego Leonard. Check out how crazy it looks from any other angle!

Drink Beer, Make Armor

break.com

WHOEVER THIS IS IS MY NEW HERO. HE GETS WHAT ARCHAEOPOP IS ALL ABOUT. IF YOU'RE NOT ON THE DIY BEER-CAN PULL-TAB CHAINMAIL BANDWAGON YET, THIS IS THE BEAUTY THAT AWAITS YOU.

AND THERE'S MORE!

via Geekologie

Photo Jay Adan

via Burntembers

AND LEST THE LADEEZ FEEL LEFT OUT...

via Crafty Mommy

GIANT INFLATABLE BOUNCY STONEHENGE

GLASGOW ARTIST CREATES GIANT BOUNCY STONEHENGE. KATIE HOSMER FROM MY MODERN MET REPORTS. I AM ALL CAPS ABOUT THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!! (via Dangerous Minds)

I’m sure that anywhere between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC, the constructors of Stonehenge definitely didn’t envision it as a bouncy playground for adults and kids alike! This inflatable version of Stonehenge, entitled Sacrilege, is the vision of British artist Jeremy Deller. "It's something for people to interact with, it's a big public sculpture," says Deller. "It is also a way of interacting with history and archaeology and culture in a wider sense."
The installation, placed in Glasgow Green for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts, is Deller’s first major public project in Scotland. The festival website explains, “Visual art happens all year round in Glasgow but for two weeks every two years, [the Festival] puts it firmly in the spotlight. From artists’ studios through to major museums, by way of a vast range of venues new and old, the Festival is the perfect moment to get to know more about contemporary art and how and where it takes place in Glasgow.”
It takes just minutes to deflate the bouncy Stonehenge every evening and re-inflate it every morning, just in time for participants to toss their shoes aside and climb onto the fun and playful public installation. Sacrilege will be at Glasgow Green for 18 days of the festival and then will be shipped off to ultimately arrive in London for the Olympic Games.

SATISFIED CUSTOMERS.

More Crowdsourcing: Track Illicit Antiquities with Wikiloot

Crowdsourcing is going to play a big role in archaeology's future. This month I'm bringing you four projects that use it to harness the enthusiasm of ordinary people to fuel innovative research. 

WikiLoot is a project by Jason Felch, one of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum. The idea is to "create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities." Says Felch:

The inspiration for WikiLoot is the vast amount of documentation seized by European investigators over the past two decades during investigations of the illicit trade in Classical antiquities smuggled (primarily) out of Greece and Italy. The business records, journals, correspondence and photographs seized from looters and middlemen during those investigations comprise a unique record of the black market.

Much of that documentation remains tangled in legal cases that are likely to end inconclusively, like that of former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht. Despite remarkable investigative work by authorities in Italy and Greece, only the trial of Italian dealer Giacomo Medici reached a verdict.

WikiLoot will make these records and photographs publicly available on the web and will enlist collaborators around the world to tag and analyze them. As with Wikipedia, participants will be given credit for their contributions. Ultimately, we hope to create the world’s most authoritative dataset of a black market whose size and reach is still poorly understood. (Estimates of the illicit antiquities trade range from $200 million a year to $10 billion dollars a year.)

This Polaroid seized from the warehouse of dealer Giacomo Medici shows the Getty Museum's Statue of Apollo shortly after it was looted from a tomb in Southern Italy.

Researchers and the interested public are invited to collaborate to help fight the destruction of archaeological sites for the antiquities trade. They've applied for funding from the Knight News Challenge.

While the project is still in development, the WikiLoot Facebook page has become a nexus for fascinating discussions about collecting, looting and museums. The posts and comment threads are a regular who's who of scholars and journalists researching the antiquities trade, including David Gill, Derek Fincham, Larry Rothfeld, Neil Brodie, Fabio Isman, and others. This is a project worth following - it has the potential to not only be tremendous fun but also an innovative precedent for future research projects.

Throw some unicorn on the grill

The British Library has discovered a long-lost medieval cookbook. The highlight? Roasted unicorn.

After recipes for herring, tripe and codswallop (fish stew, a popular dish in the Middle Ages) comes that beginning "Taketh one unicorne". The recipe calls for the beast to be marinaded in cloves and garlic, and then roasted on a griddle. The cookbook's compiler, doubtless Geoffrey Fule himself, added pictures in its margins, depicting the unicorn being prepared and then served.

This is so f-ed up but I can't stop laughing. More illuminations after the jump. 

Must Read: How Europe Hawks its Monuments

In the midst of its worst crisis in generations, Greece is trying to make more money from heritage, stirring up a hornets' nest of protest. But is commercializing heritage really something new? Dieter Baretzko in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung puts it in context (h/t Elginism).

Greece pimps its ancient monuments to bring in the tourists, lovers of cultural heritage are up in arms. But the country is only doing openly what the whole of Europe is: looting historic sites to drum up more ready cash. 

Disparaging comments went to press practically before the Greek government spokesman had even reached the end of his declaration that the country’s ancient monuments would be used in future for commercial purposes. The Acropolis is thus to become a stage for advertisements and action movies; the Athens’ Agora, birthplace of parliamentary democracy, a playground for fashion shows and 007 stunts; and the Kerameikos, the nearly three-thousand-year-old cemetery, will become the backdrop for commercials featured perfumed sex maniacs touching themselves in their sleep. That’s more or less the future for Greece’s ancient cultural heritage in the looming shadow of the European financial crisis, as cultural pessimists paint it.

One could believe that almost overnight the impending bankruptcy of Greece has turned the country from the cradle of European culture and democracy into a whore ready for anything. But Greece’s negligence towards its ancient world heritage is not a new phenomenon. During the preparations for the Olympic Games in 2004 famous ancient sites such as Marathon were crudely worked up into competition venues and prettified with questionable reproductions of vanished monuments from antiquity. Even the decades-long reconstruction of the Parthenon, which not only wishes to rebuild damaged parts but also missing ones as well, has been grounded as deeply in tourism’s taste for pristine intact sites as in a taste archaeological knowledge. 

If one were to look for an event that may have sparked this, then the discovery of the tomb of Philip II of Macedonia in 1977 – in Vergina (Aigai in antiquity) in northern Greece – might spring to mind. It was a sensational discovery: the very tomb of the father of Alexander the Great, with untold wealth in gold and silver treasure, and the ashes of the ruler wrapped in a gold-embroidered purple cloth. 

Delphi and the Palace of Knossos – open-air studios
Everyone involved grasped that tourists woul queue all night to see the exhibit and got busy straight away preparing a spectacular exhibition. Inquiries to specialists in antique fabrics, however, revealed that unfolding and preserving the purple fabric would take years. One restorer, though, spoke of months – on condition that only one part of the cloth would be saved. The offer was accepted, and the exhibit opened on schedule in Thessaloniki. Record crowds streamed through. 

Decades of neglect had prepared the terrain for this opening of the floodgates. The Greek parliament now intends that Delphi and the Palace of Knossos on Crete be rented out as open-air studios, for good money – and not at intervals of four years, like the Olympics, but as often as possible. 

Is that really any reason, though, to point an accusing finger at Greece? Was anyone offended in 2010 when Italy’s cultural authorities allowed Pompeii’s ancient theatre to be crammed with new seats and clunky containers for stage technicians and sanitary needs to allow lucrative concerts to be held there again – concerts that had been banned in 1976 after audiences caused immense damage? Does anyone still recall the recent scandal that shocked Rome when stones tumbled down off the Coliseum, which has been trampled across for decades by the tourist trade? 

“Dracula’s Wedding – a delicious dinner show with bite”
The laws of the free market have applied to monuments too, for a long time now. All European countries have polished up their historic sites to bring in money. From Vienna’s Museum Quarter, which since 1998 has seen the Baroque court stables converted into the “eighth largest cultural area in the world” thanks to an eccentric new museum, to Germany’s tiny town of Xanten whose ancient Roman core has been enlarged into an open-air museum where waiters in antique costume serve visitors ancient cuisine in reconstructed baths and taverns, ancient sites across Europe are turning into “location factors” that open up new sources of revenue for economically ailing communities.
Germany, formerly resistant to the crisis, is no exception. Take Dresden, which likes to boast of itself as the crown of the Baroque era. There, in 2010, after an endless and futile search for investors, the ravishingly beautiful Kurlander Palace, bombed out in February 1945, was rebuilt. Not as a museum, concert hall or other place of culture, but as an “event location”. One could, so the operators promise on the internet, “rediscover a fairy-tale palace brought back to life,” including its “magic, which is still pervasive.” The main attraction in the former ballroom of the Kurlander Palace is described as “Dracula’s Wedding – a delicious dinner show with bite.” 

What is the difference here with the culture-peddlers in Greece? In the shadow of the euro crisis, everywhere greed and lack of money are going hand in hand. In Athens, with their backs to the wall, the Greeks are just doing publicly what others have been practicing under the cover of relative stability. The victims are always the monuments – and lovers of culture too, who in place of historical sites are more and more frequently being offered “event locations”. At a good price, of course. 

Translated from the German by Anton Baer