View imageFor their deep influence on our culture's attitudes towards Sports and Sex alone, the ancient Greeks are undeniably important.

Oh, yeah . . . and there's the Democracy and Philosophy stuff.

Theater as we know it.

Oh, and Science.

But visually, hardly a 2D or 3D creation goes by that is not touched by the Greeks' love of both the observable world (especially the human bod) and the eye of the viewer. Seeing things and identifying them as beautiful, their legacy asserts, is a key part of what it is to be human.

That's why the opening on June 20th of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, after decades of wrangling and years of construction delays, is an important event for all visual makers.

For the people's eye view, you know how I love flickr slideshows to get an impression of what it's like to visit. (Sadly, the RobW who contributed a number of excellent images is not me.)
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I've been following the progress of the museum for the last few years, including the idealistic architecture fly-through (which you can check out on the Museum's site), and the re-vamping of the museum's design to accomodate the ruins found beneath it during the construction. The ruins are now visible in an open atrium. The museum's basic architectural design is what you'd expect from a socially sensitive postmodernist (Bernard Tschumi of Switzerland): lots of moments of smartness --- sitelines through the galleries up to the Acropolis itself, sleek reconstructions of original proportions and original ways in which the objects meet the gaze of their original viewers.

But the main piece of architetural and cultural intelligence centers around the great aching gap at the heart of the museum's collection. Tschumi's space designed to house sculptor Phideas's mind-bendingly briliant creations that  once adorned the Parthenon itself leaves clear holes (filled with cheap-o, pale, plaster imitations) for the 75 meters of the 160 meter frieze that are now located in the British Museum, sawed off the building and spirited away at the beginning of the 19th century by Lord Elgin --- the so-called "Elgin marbles."

Since its inception the efforts to build the New Acropolis Museum have been intertwined with the efforts, notably spearheaded early on  by actress/Minister of Culture Melina Mercouri, to get the British museum to return the Elgin marbles to what every Greek feels is their rightful home.

Many other countries have already returned their Greek treasures, but the British Museum remains obstinate against the repeated suits and petitions that have, themselves, lasted nearly 200 years since the lordly pilfering. The excuse/explanation I grew up with --- Elgin saved the marbles, which would have been destroyed by pollution and vandalism . .. and therefore, for some reason, we get to keep them --- has now completely evaporated. The new museum has state of the art climate and pollution control and the statues couldn't hope to be better cared for.

The current excuse, from the mouth of British Museum Director Neil MacGregor as quoted in the Telegraph is: " it is the museum's duty to 'preserve the universality of the marbles, and to protect them from being appropriated as a nationalistic political symbol' ." This is self-evidently lame. Keeping them in colonial England is, in fact, a nationalistic political symbol of the first order.

We can only hope that the British Museum can quickly find the decency to do the right thing.

In the meantime, when you're next in Athens, make this a must-see.