USA: Pharaoh Tutankhamun exhibition commercialized

This is a video about Tutankhamun‘s death mask at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

From the Google cache of Dear Kitty ModBlog.

7/1/05 at 9:35AM

Mood: Thinking Playing: Walk like an Egyptian, by the Bangles

Art for a change blog has an entry called The Curse of King Tut.

No, it is not about the urban legend of Pharaoh Tutankhamun supposedly punishing discoverers of his grave thousands of years after his death.

Art for a change blog writes about commercialization:

I saw the Treasures of Tutankhamen when it showed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1978.

At the time the entrance fee was $2 (today’s equivalent adjusted for inflation would be $6).

After nearly 30 years the treasures have returned to LACMA as a razzle dazzle Hollywood road show called Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

The exhibit bares a whopping $30 admission fee, but that’s only part of the controversy surrounding the show.

I wrote a blog post in December of 2004 entitled, Affluent Appropriate Art, that addressed the commercialization of art museums.

In that post I said the following, “As with public libraries, art museums should exist to serve the public. The mission of educating, inspiring, and uplifting society has been the calling of art museums… thus far. The erstwhile objective of enriching the social order has evidently been abandoned in favor of the profit motive.”

How they turned King Tut to tat: here.

A 3,000-year-old mystery is finally solved: Tutankhamun died in a hunting accident: here.

The new Egyptian Museum at Gizeh: here.

Tutankhamun and Art Deco: here.

King Tut Felled By Injury And Malaria, Not Murder: here.