Published: January 24th, 2012 at 3:05 am ET
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Title: Critics Fear Louvre’s Plan to Loan Art to Fukushima Carries Radiation Risks
Source: Blouin ARTINFO
Author: ARTINFO France
Date: Jan 23, 2012
[...] the Louvre did not consult France’s Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety. Roland Desbordes, president of the Commission on Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, told the environmental site Zegreenweb that radioactivity is still present in the area around Fukushima and that wind can move contaminants into the city, where visitors could bring them into the museum. “In order to decontaminate an object made of porous material, even if it’s made of stone, you have to scratch it,” Desbordes said. “For a tapestry or painting, it’s much more complicated and delicate.”The Louvre is taking the utmost precaution to ensure the integrity of the loaned art. Crates holding the pieces will be opened only inside the museum and the objects will be placed behind thick glass. The paintings will never be exposed to the atmosphere and their radioactivity will be checked upon arrival. [...]
Read the report here
Published: January 24th, 2012 at 3:05 am ET
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Children from Fukushima Make Pleas to the Government (Aug. 17, 2011) (Part 2 of 4)
if they could treat children the same way as they treat art??
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Bravo, yes! The children are the future artists of Japan, who will create the artworks that will be treasured and handled with the greatest of care. They are the vessels and voices of the future–protect them now or the future mutates and dies with their dna.
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Just more evidence of our backwards world. War is peace, poor is rich, innocent is guilty, and of course, now, dead inanimate objects are taken care of more than living children. What else is backwards? lol
Stop paying taxes Japan. That is the instant solution. Do all transactions under the table and stop filing your tax returns. Also, allow them to take zero dollars out of your paycheck and tell them you’ll pay at the end of the year (Which you won’t)
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Each of the four children make request !
Turn on CC
Thanks for the repost !
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“The Louvre is taking the utmost precaution to ensure the integrity of the loaned art. Crates holding the pieces will be opened only inside the museum and the objects will be placed behind thick glass. The paintings will never be exposed to the atmosphere and their radioactivity will be checked upon arrival.
All this security won’t limit access to the exhibitions, though. Japan is financing the traveling show, and admission costs will be free or minimal, depending on the location”
how much is this goimg to cost the japanese tax payer??
how much does the louvre or associated moving companies , pr etc make on the deal??
BIG PR!!
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No, Samsung… NOBODY DESERVES THIS!!
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You should focus your anger on governments and politicians, not entire countries and all their people. All governments commit crimes and atrocities, including yours. No country deserves to be irradiated and poisoned for eternity. Careful about gleefully wishing nuclear death to Japan. The Korean peninsula may one day find itself a nuclear wasteland, destroyed by Koreans fighting Koreans.
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Ahhh Samsung, there you go again. Showing up here from time to time, showing your ugly face.
Just go away.
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An these loved treasures, the medium of communication between masters minds and our perception will now carry deadly emissions with them IF they are allowed to parade forward to be exhibited in the future.
I would like an inventory of these objects and EVERY single object they co-exhibit with from now and down through time.
EVERY single one should be burned and the ash encased in glass.
Soon there will be no treasures of great ones left.
I think that might be the point.
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Of all the stories coming from Fukushima lately, this one depresses me the most. A Dali-esque image came to mind – deserts, melting clock pieces and melting people. I saw rays of sun streaming through the holes of a collapsed roof, reflecting light on the glass that covers these now faded masterpieces. A tree branch punctures a Monet. I thought of Angkor Wat and the Egyptian pyramids, then laughed at myself because our modern structures will never survive thousands of years. I watched the video posted by Arclight and Banksy immediately came to mind. I had a brief fantasy of a mob of black-clothed child protestors placing pictures of radioactive wastelands and oceans and human bodies suffering the ravages of radiation poisoning over the glass cases protecting these “sacred” works of art. I saw the hypocrisy of man. I experienced the article as opposed having read it – kind of like an acid trip. Al-Chemisto’s comments resonated within me. I conjured up images of long cues of Japanese children wandering through the museum filled with ash encased by glass. This is your future, children.
What kind of karma will befall these pimps at the Louvre? I cannot believe that any of the artists whose work will be covered in glass would be pleased to know that their art is believed to be more important than humanity. Protect the art, not the people! My god, what have we come to? Why not use every bit of money used to promote this traveling display to relocate the people of Fukushima?
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I hope the paintings become heavily contaminated. What more of an artistic expression than a painting being heavily contaminated, yet people being unable to see it. I’d love to take a blank canvas and paint highly energetic gamma emitting radionuclides all over it. When people walk through they will be interested in a blank canvas because they will keep wondering, “What the heck is a blank canvas doing here? Is something actually there that we can’t see?” I think that would be a great statement to what Fukushima is like and how radionuclides are undetectable by humans.
Perhaps if these “sacred” (Aren’t children more sacred?) artworks become contaminated, people might begin to understand that you can’t see, hear, smell, or feel how dangerously contaminated something is no matter how beautiful it looks. Then again, that is giving too much faith to human beings. I firmly believe that our populations have been dumbed down intentionally so we are good little slaves.
P.S. I’d make the paintings just over the limit of contamination requiring special hazmat transportation rules and show how low of a level it is (Still dangerous) to contrast it with the extremely levels being recorded throughout Japan of people, places, food, water, air and products. Maybe, we could start an exhibition titled, “Nuclear Power’s Fingerprints”, with radionuclides from around the world’s nuclear accidents on canvas.
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They are without shame…
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Even the Mona Lisa is not worth the life of one human. Much less the concern about artwork compared to the health and welfare of 125 million humans in Japan. What a travesty that the French, world leaders in nuclear power plants, are so fearful of nuclear industry radiation leaks in Japan aided in part by their secretive shipments of plutonium fuel to Japan’s Fukushima plant two years.
The same French nuclear poison that blew up into the jetstream at Unit 3. One speck in your lungs will kill you and can’t be removed from your body. They should have been keeping their poison behind thick glass and not putting it in 40-year old reactors that are not designed for hot MOX fuel.
Germany has realized nuclear energy is a monster that can’t be contained. It’s time the rest of the nuclear countries wake up to that fact before their own Fukushima disaster destroys their country.
Government bureaucrats can avoid talking about the horror of Fukushima to try and save the nuclear industry jobs, their powerful money connections, and the panic it might cause if people of the world knew how bad the situation is not only in Japan, but the entire planet affected by the deadly air releases and ocean releases in Japan. But they will not escape the verdict of history… Even if it is told by the last survivors on earth huddled in a cave in South America.
The nuclear cabal has unleashed the horrors of Pandora’s box and it can’t be contained for the next million years. Mankind is on a slippery slope to self-extinction.
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“Even the Mona Lisa is not worth the life of one human.”
A delicious question in the abstract, Sickputer. Society makes this kind of tradeoff all the time though. “Go and fight for your country – be willing to die for our way of life, blah blah”, or “we have to accept that there will be some fatalities when we (drive, mine coal, fly airplanes,…) but the overall benefits to society are worth it blah blah.”
It turns out we all have different tolerance thresholds for the mortality risk of other people, but most of the time we don’t need to think about it.
In any case, I think the more interesting aspect of the present art vs. humanity scuffle is the position of the bureaucrats whose job it is to protect the art. I imagine they are completely blind to the other side of the equation – that’s someone else’s job, from their point of view. It’s their job to protect the artwork, and they will do it no matter what.
My impression of the bureaucratic mindset in general is that such people are really really good at doing one thing such as protecting the artwork or ensuring that every box is filled in on a form or using an airport body scanner exactly as instructed in the manual. My guess is that the Fukushima tragedy is made much worse by the efforts of hundreds or thousands of such people working hard to do “what they are supposed to do”.
We were told (don’t have the reference handy) that when the tsunami started to hit the Fukushima plant and people started to run to the exit kiosk… that the guard would not let people out because it was not authorized. The story didn’t say whether that was a momentary delay, whether the guard eventually relented, or whether he perished at his post.
Anyway, I take the present art story as a useful insight into human behavior.
SHUT THEM ALL DOWN
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I believe the bureaucratic mindset is exactly the same as the corporate mindset/model. You are dead on with your comment, “My impression of the bureaucratic mindset in general is that such people are really really good at doing one thing…” That is the same way corporations operate and any large monolithic power structure for that matter. It is also the reason why secrecy can exist in such a large population and large number of workers on a project. It’s the very definition of corporate/bureaucratic models that make them so deadly and sociopathic.
It all started when the financiers of the industrial revolution wanted to increase productivity (and as an effect destroy quality), and to decrease the amount of resistance from workers due to poor working conditions. The workers also would complain when they felt the company was operating in an unethical manner such as overcharging people for crap products or environmental reasons. They found out that the highly skilled machinist who would create a product, from start to finish, knew too much about the process and product that he would be able to complain about unfair conditions. You take away that knowledge and no one can complain or even be held liable for wrong doing. Only a select few know the entire plan; Not the people working on the plan, but the ones who are at the very tippy-top of the pyramid. The people who think they are in charge of the workers don’t even know the truth because they are also pigeon-holed into a specific duty. The government took notice and now we have more “organizations” of government than ever before exactly because they are so “efficient” and allow people to do and support things they otherwise would object to. Also, make people dependant on such a system and there will be almost zero opposition. The government knows that people will not fight against injustices and evil that they do not know exist.
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The government version does not agree with you, Bones (but I do). This is not from George Orwell, but it could be: “We are your neighbors, friends, and relatives…”
http://www.tsa.gov/who_we_are/index.shtm
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The first link is not complete without adding one like this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0123/Rand-Paul-detained-Rep.-refuses-airport-patdown-after-alarm
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The people of Japan should show up to the exhibit in full radiation protection wear, complete with masks…to display the unofficial dangers they must face to get to the museum…that I assume is a safe place for art….theater of the absurd
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How not to do a disaster…. Picture this… the ship was sinking.. The passengers were told repeatedly by loudspeaker that this was just an electrical problem, and would be fixed very soon. Everyone was under control… No need to worry, everyone is safe.
Meanwhile the ship listed and then sank. Luckily, it had hit a reef and grounded, or the death toll would have been much worse. Few or no lifeboats were used, because no one thought the ship was sinking and once the ship listed, the lifeboats lowering mechanisms no longer worked. The captain was one of the first to leave the ship, so the passengers were left to their fate. He said that he ‘accidentally’ fell into one of the lifeboats.
What can we learn from this disaster at sea? We are all sailing on the Costa Concordia.
In many ways, this world is a ship sailing towards an iceberg or reef, with a disaster in the making, just in slow motion. Fukushima is a nuclear disaster that can still potentially wipe out all humankind, but the captain keeps repeating ‘cold shutdown’, and all of the passengers believe him.
The 400 or so nuclear power plants globally are also a disaster in the making, just waiting for the next Carrington effect to melt down and blow up. The captain keeps saying that they are all safe, so the passengers just sit in the deck chairs as the sun rises on the horizon, not even knowing what is coming.
The C02 levels keep rising faster and faster. The monopolistic carbon industry captains keep repeating everything is safe, all systems are normal, as the air, oceans, soils, forests and rivers become more and more acid, to the point of life extinction.. All of the human passengers on the ship called Earth sail merrily along, shopping, watching sports and having a good time.
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Don’t they realize the worse radioactive particles go through BUILDINGS, walls…etc.?
GLASS doesn’t stop radioactivity! What a JOKE!
All they need is 1 hot particle imbedding in a painting or sculpture and it’s done for.
Why don’t they build a Starbucks and a Mall beside it while they’re at it to bring in more people.
Then they’ll be saying, “We didn’t think this was possible!”
I guess they didn’t learn from the NUCLEAR ACCIDENT itself….underestimating is always STUPID.
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if they want to send art to fukushima, it should be mounted and sealed in glass and supported with a positive pressure system using dry nitrogen or argon, so it never sees the air from japan.
when the art is being returned, it can be transported to the southern island, the outsides of the glass can be decontaminated and they can be placed in new cases for shipment back to france.
this process can be repeated again on reception.
that should ensure the art is protected.
the real reason the japanese government wants this exhibit is to draw visitors to fukushima.
See the treasures of the Louvre and get Lung cancer…. All with travel subsidy of the government.
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