Directors of major UK museums call for attacks on artworks to stop

The National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC), which represents the leaders of the UK’s national collections and major regional museums, have written an open letter calling for the end of ‘protest action’ in museums and galleries. Over the last few years, activists – often from the campaign group Just Stop Oil – have been targeting famous works in various ways, including glueing themselves to the frames, throwing soup at paintings covered by glass and applying graffiti to gallery walls and floors. ‘Whilst we respect the right for people to protest, and are often sympathetic to the cause,’ says the NMDC letter, published in the Art Newspaper, ‘these attacks have to stop. They are hugely damaging to the reputation of UK museums and cause enormous stress for colleagues […] along with visitors who now no longer feel safe visiting the nation’s finest museums and galleries.’ Earlier this week, two members of the protest group Youth Demand were arrested for pasting a photo of a Gazan mother and her son over Picasso’s painting Motherhood (1901) in the National Gallery in London. (They have since been released.) Jai Halai, 23, and Malachi Rosenfeld, 21, used a photo taken in October 2023 of a crying mother in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza hugging her son, who had been injured by an Israeli airstrike. A spokesperson for Youth Demand said: ‘Our government is arming Israel to carry out a genocide against Palestinians […] a two-way arms embargo is the least Britain can do to stop displacement, destruction and death’. The National Gallery has confirmed that no damage had been done to the painting, which was behind protective glass.

The culture minister in Lebanon’s caretaker government has called upon Unesco to help protect the World Heritage Sites in the country. In an interview with the New Arab, Mohammed Mortada asked for $100,000 in funding and expressed concern for the safety of Lebanon’s culture heritage after Israeli airstrikes came within 50om of the archaeological site of Baalbek last week. On Friday, the governor of the Baalbek-Hermel region told the New Arab’s Arabic-language counterpart that Lebanese security forces are guarding the Unesco World Heritage site to prevent looting and to prevent anyone hiding among the structures: ‘…no one thinks that it is possible to enter or hide inside’. The ruins of the temple complex at Baalbek joined the World Heritage List in 1984 and are regarded as among the finest surviving examples of imperial Roman architecture.

A shield looted by the British after the Siege of Maqdala in 1868 will be returned to Ethiopia, reports the Art Newspaper. The object was put up for auction in February by the Newcastle-based auction house Anderson & Garland, but was withdrawn after the Ethiopian Heritage Authority wrote to the auction house, saying that the shield had been ‘wrongfully acquired in a context of a punitive expedition to Ethiopia’ and requesting restitution of the object. Currently on show in the exhibition ‘Ethiopia at the Crossroads’ at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the shield will return to Ethiopia in November and go on display at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian government has for decades been campaigning for the UK to return looted Maqdala artefacts, which can be found in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.

Security guards at the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum in London have voted in favour of strike action. The strike will take place over three days from 25 October and will involve a picket outside the Science Museum. The demands of United Voices of the World (UVW), the union that represents the guards, are a minimum wage of £16 an hour, full sick-pay entitlement from day one of employment and a week’s extra annual leave. The union said in a statement this week that the security guards it represents ‘are responsible for the safety of millions of people every year, as well as for protecting priceless exhibits’, but that Wilson James, the contractor that employs the security guards, has presided over ‘real terms pay cuts for years’ and ‘refuses to negotiate with UVW’. When action was first threatened in September, a spokesperson for Wilson James said that the company was ‘actively engaged in conversations with […] formally recognised trade union representatives’ and that it was ‘dedicated to seeking an effective pay resolution’.