Spring Flings

In no way overshadowed by this news was the presentation that same night of the Sue Cannon Award to beloved arts advocate and donor Nancy Tieken, who has spread her fortune around to art groups coast to coast and has, in recent years, given a lot of money to the DAM.

The ever-charming Tieken told the story of how she was able to do the things she does, laying it all at the feet of her grandfather, the fabulously wealthy Henry Babson, a one-time partner of Thomas Alva Edison. "When I was a little girl, he gave me a dime and asked me to use it to call him from a pay phone," Tieken said. "He wanted to find out if I was responsible enough to be trusted with it -- so it all started with a dime." Eventually, as is obvious, she got a lot more than a dime from her grandfather.

While Tieken has not been a major player at or contributor to the MCA, she did say that there was something about it -- a museum with a staff of six -- that really appealed to her. So maybe this situation is about to change. Let's hope it does, because Tieken could really help the MCA get a much-needed new building.

This is a great opportunity for the MCA, but fundraising, even if they're lucky enough to get Tieken on board, is going to be an uphill battle. For now, though, it's exciting news for those of us who love art and believe in the MCA's mission to promote contemporary art. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be doing it in what Falcone calls "a museum building of our own time."

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And what a strange time our own time is, especially for art. Museums may be expanding in Denver, but they're being destroyed in Baghdad.

The invasion of Baghdad by coalition forces a few weeks ago led to the dissolution of civil government in Iraq. One consequence was that there were no longer any police. This is not a good thing to happen to a city of 5 million people, and it triggered a series of unimaginable crimes against humanity. I'm referring, of course, to the destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage through looting.

On Friday, April 11, and continuing into the following day, the National Museum in Baghdad was stripped. What was described as "thousands" of people ran through the museum removing -- or in many cases, breaking --countless objects, some of them priceless treasures from antiquity.

In an unbelievable irony, the lawless horde may have carried off tablets inscribed with Hammurabi's Code, one of the oldest known listings of laws in the world. The tablets were in the museum's collection, but it's unclear whether they were in the building during the horrible two days that it was being stripped. In fact, it will be a long time before the extent of the losses are fully known and we learn exactly what is missing, because many pieces from the National Museum's collection were displayed in Iraqi public buildings and in Saddam Hussein's palaces -- and those places were looted, too!

Television coverage showed the museum's interior in a totally wrecked condition, with the floors of the galleries a foot or two deep in jagged shards, evidence that art objects had been destroyed in the melee. The sacking of the National Museum was followed on April 15 by the looting and subsequent burning of the National Library and many other repositories of the artifacts and documents that illuminate Iraq's very long history.

It's a tremendous loss for the country, comparable to Poland's in the Second World War, when the Nazis removed everything of artistic value and shipped it back to Germany. Interestingly, this is the same thing the Iraqis themselves did when they invaded Kuwait in 1991. Armed units accompanied by a complement of archaeologists, curators, conservators and other experts went to museums and major collections in Kuwait and took what they wanted. Presumably, some of this former Kuwaiti material wound up in Iraq's now-destroyed National Museum.

Surely, the thieves of Baghdad carry their share of the responsibility for these events, but isn't it really the United States-led coalition forces who are to blame? Didn't they displace the Baghdad police without providing an alternative security force to protect these sites? Again, there's an apt comparison to events in World War II, but this time it's a contrasting one. When the Allies invaded Italy, there were art scholars on the front lines, and properties of cultural value, fully enumerated in U.S. Army manuals, were immediately secured and protected, even while battles raged only miles away. It's astounding how much attitudes have changed in this country since then, because, as we now know, no such thing happened in Baghdad.