История коллекционирования искусства Востока: выявление собраний чаеторговцев в коллекциях региональных музеев России

IntroductionIn regional Australia and New Zealand, museums and art galleries are increasingly becoming primary sites of cultural engagement. They are one of the key tourist attractions for regional towns and expected to generate much needed tourism revenue. In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were three million visitors to regional galleries and museums (MGNSW 13). However, apart from those (partially) funded by local councils, they are often run on donations, good will, and the enthusiasm of volunteers. Regional museums and galleries provide some paid, and more unpaid, employment for ageing populations. While two-thirds of Australia’s population lives in capital cities, the remainder who live in regional towns are likely to be in the 60+ age cohort because people are choosing to retire away from the bustling, growing cities (ABS). At last count, there were about 3000 museums and galleries in Australia with about 80% of them located in regional areas (Scott). Over the last 40 years, this figure has tripled from the 1000 regional and provincial museums estimated by Peter Piggott in his 1975 report (24). According to a 2014 survey (Shaw and Davidson), New Zealand has about 470 museums and galleries and about 70% are located outside capital cities. The vast majority, 85%, have less than five, full-time paid staff, and more than half of these were run entirely by ageing volunteers. They are entrusted with managing the vast majority of the history and heritage collections of Australia and New Zealand. These ageing volunteers need a diverse range of skills and experience to care for and interpret collections. How do you find the time and budget for professional development for both paid staff and volunteers? Many professional development events are held in capital cities, which are often a significant distance from the regional museum—this adds substantially to the costs of attending and the time commitment required to get there. In addition, it is not uncommon for people working in regional museums to be responsible for everything—from security, collection management, conservation, research, interpretation and public programs to changing the light bulbs. While there are a large number of resources available online, following a manual is often more difficult than learning from other colleagues or learning in a more formal educational or vocational environment where you can receive timely feedback on your work. Further, a foundational level of prior knowledge and experience is often required to follow written instructions. This article will suggest some strategies for low cost professional development and networking. It involves planning, thinking strategically and forming partnerships with others in the region. It is time to harness the power of modern communications technology and use it as a tool for professional development. Some models of professional development in regional areas that have been implemented in the past will also be reviewed. The focus for this article is on training and professional development for workers in regional museums, heritage sites and keeping places. Regional art galleries have not been included because they tend to have separate regional networks and training opportunities. For example, there are professional development opportunities provided through the Art Galleries Association of Australia and their state branches. Regional galleries are also far more likely to have one or more paid staff members (Winkworth, “Fixing the Slums” 2). Regional Museums, Volunteers, and Social CapitalIt is widely accepted that regional museums and galleries enhance social capital and reduce social isolation (Kelly 32; Burton and Griffin 328). However, while working in a regional museum or gallery can help to build friendship networks, it can also be professionally isolating. How do you benchmark what you do against other places if you are two or more hours drive from those places? How do you learn from other colleagues if all your colleagues are also isolated by the ‘tyranny of distance’ and struggling with the same lack of access to training? In 2017 in New South Wales alone, there were 8,629 active volunteers working in regional museums and galleries giving almost five million hours, which Museums and Galleries NSW calculated was worth over $150 million per annum in unpaid labour (MGNSW 1). Providing training and professional development to this group is an investment in Australia’s social and cultural capital.Unlike other community-run groups, the museums and heritage places which have emerged in regional Australia and New Zealand are not part of a national or state branch network. Volunteers who work for the Red Cross, Scouts or Landcare benefit from being part of a national organisation which provides funding, support workers, a website, governance structure, marketing, political advocacy and training (Winkworth, “Let a Thousand Flowers” 11). In Australia and New Zealand, this role is undertaken by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association AMaGA (formerly Museums Australia) and Museums Aotearoa respectively. However, both of these groups operate at the macro policy level, for example organising annual conferences, publishing a journal and developing Indigenous policy frameworks, rather than the local, practical level. In 1995, due to their advocacy work, Landcare Australia received $500 million over five years from the federal government to fund 5000 Landcare groups, which are run by 120,000 volunteers (Oppenheimer 177). They argued successfully that the sustainable development of land resources started at the local level. What do we need to do to convince government of the need for sustainable development of our local and regional museum and heritage resources?Training for Volunteers Working in Regional Museums: The Current SituationAnother barrier to training for regional museum workers is the assumption that the 70:20:10 model of professional development should apply. That is, 70% of one’s professional development is done ‘on the job’ by completing tasks and problem-solving; 20% is achieved by learning from mentors, coaches and role models and 10% is learnt from attending conferences and symposia and enrolling in formal courses of study. However, this model pre-supposes that there are people in your workplace whom you can learn from and who can show you how to complete a task, and that you are not destroying or damaging a precious, unique object if you happen to make a mistake.Some museum volunteers come with skills in research, marketing, administration, customer service or photography, but very few come with specific museum skills like writing exhibition text, registering an acquisition or conserving artefacts. These skills need to be taught. As Kylie Winkworth has written, museum management now requires a [...] skills set, which is not so readily found in small communities, and which in many ways is less rewarding for the available volunteers, who may have left school at 15. We do not expect volunteer librarians to catalogue books, which are in any case of low intrinsic value, but we still expect volunteers in their 70s and 80s to catalogue irreplaceable heritage collections and meet ever more onerous museum standards. That so many volunteers manage to do this is extraordinary. (“Let a Thousand Flowers” 13)Workers in regional museums are constantly required to step outside their comfort zones and learn new skills with minimal professional support. While these challenging experiences can be very rewarding, they are also potentially damaging for our irreplaceable material cultural heritage.Training for museum professionals has been on the agenda of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 1947 (Boylan 62). However, until 1996, their work focused on recommending curricula for new museum professionals and did not include life-long learning and on-going professional development. ICOM’s International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICTOP) and the ICOM Executive has responded to this in their new curricula—ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Professional Museum Development, but this does not address the difficulties staff or volunteers working in regional areas face in accessing training.In some parts of Australia, there are regional support and professional development programs in place. For example, in Queensland, there is the Museum Development Officer (MDO) network. However, because of the geographic size of the state and the spread of the museums, these five regionally based staff often have 60-80 museums or keeping places in their region needing support and so their time and expertise is spread very thinly. It is also predominantly a fee-for-service arrangement. That is, the museums have to pay for the MDO to come and deliver training. Usually this is done by the MDO working with a local museum to apply for a Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) grant. In Victoria there is a roving curator program where eligible regional museums can apply to have a professional curator come and work with them for a few days to help the volunteers curate exhibitions. The roving curator can also provide advice on “develop[ing] high quality exhibitions for diverse audiences” via email, telephone and networking events. Tasmania operates a similar scheme but their two roving curators are available for up to 25 days of work each year with eligible museums, provided the local council makes a financial contribution. The New South Wales government supports the museum advisor program through which a museum professional will come to your museum for up to 20 days/year to give advice and hands-on training—provided your local council pays $7000, an amount that is matched by the state government—for this service. In 2010, in response to recommendations in the Dunn Report (2007), the Collections Council of Australia (CCA) established a pilot project with the City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in West

Crisis management is inherent to the museum activity in Southern countries. Since their creation, Southern museums have been doomed to a continuous revisionism of practices in order to remain alive and useful to society. Investigation of historic, economic and social forces that contributed to the creation of museums in the South highlights their peculiarities in contrast to the Western institutions. In the South, museum foundation corresponds to political emancipation, which does not imply collecting local artifacts. Art collections in Brazil museums have pieces that allude directly to European culture. Western art commands the exhibition circuit in local museums. This characteristic has consolidated complementary notions of museums in Brazil. In the common person’s imagination, a museum is a space aimed at those who have been initiated in cultural matters. For the elite, local museums have insignificant collections, hence they do not deserve any attention. The combination of these two perceptions results in the crisis Brazilian museums are still facing. Inefficient cultural policies and a timid society’s participation in the cultural sector has led museums to act aggressively to bring the public into the world of art.

When re-assessing women’s roles in the art world, we should not neglect traditional, perhaps stereotypical, functions. Jo van Bilderbeek-Lamaison (1849–1951) exemplifies the importance of caretaking: after her husband’s death in 1918, she played a crucial role in caring for their art collection and bequeathing it to the state. She lived in a Dordrecht house museum (the Rijksmuseum Van Bilderbeek-Lamaison, not publicly accessible), carefully exercising her responsibility ‘in her husband’s spirit’ in house maintenance, loans of artworks, and art preservation – a challenge given the fuel crisis in the 1930s and 1940s. This case study sheds light on women’s role in the art world around 1900 from the perspective of separate public/private spheres and the associated distinction between productive labour and reproductive/caring labour. The case suggests that caring labour is not be limited to care for people, but can include care for objects, such as an art collection in a house museum.

The article analyzes the activities of the emchi-lamas in modern Tuva. In addition to biographical information and the specifics of medical practices, it examines such issues as the official status of Tibetan medicine in Tuva, the attitude of the local population towards it, and its development in modern realities. Analyzing the state of Tibetan medicine and the position of emchi-lamas with professional education in Tuva, the author draws on the experience of Buryatia, comparing the development of alternative medicine, as it is often called, in the two regions, and predicting possible paths of development in the modern technologically advanced world. The beginning of the article also covers the penetration of Buddhism into Tuva, the status of the emchi-lamas in pre-revolutionary Tuva and in the Tuvan People’s Republic (1921–1944), providing their names and biographical data. Using the unique collection of Buddhist art of the National Museum of Tuva as the main source, the author writes about the long-established tradition of Tibetan (Tibeto-Tuvan) medicine and the existence of the cult of the Medicine (Healing) in the pre-revolutionary period. Information about folk healers and emchi-lamas of Tibetan origin who regularly visit Tuva is also provided. As an example of successful interaction between Tibetan medicine and biomedicine, the article describes the activities of emchi-lama Sherchin. In cooperation with doctors from the Infectious Diseases Hospital of Republic of Tuva, he treated patients with hepatitis in an experimental group.

The author, basing on an analytical review of many publications, describes the contribution of museums of the Urals and Siberia to the studies in the fields of the 17th century Flemish and Dutch art. There are works of masters of Flanders and Holland in all Russian museums that have at least small Western European collections in their funds. This fact largely determinate the intensive development of Netherlandish studies in art-historical science in our country. Flemish and Dutch collections of Ural and Siberian museums are not large in number, but include rare and valuable works that deserve the attention of specialists and public. The fate of these works is connected with the history of private collecting in Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The significant part of this corpus of works has been introduced into scientific circulation by publications in albums and catalogues edited to now time. This article gives brief description of collections of Flemish and Dutch art in the museums of Yekaterinburg, Irbit, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Tyumen, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk, analyzes publications devoted to them and examines the most interesting cases of attribution practice. It is concluded that the work carried out by the museum specialists of these regions represents a serious contribution to the studies in the 17th century Flemish and Dutch art and the need for further researches is noted.

In their First Word essay, “Listening as a Radical Act,” Erica de Greef, Shayna Goncalves, and Angela Jansen (2021) argue for the importance of listening as a means to overcome our legacies of colonization. Without listening, it is too easy to assume that “fashion” is inherently capitalist and modern, created by genius designers (artists) in Western fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York) and that everything else is just a pale imitation. The way I have stated this might seem like an exaggeration—surely it can't be that bad in fashion studies—but as the authors have pointed out from their own diverse perspectives, it really is that bad. Too many people have experienced the study and curation of fashion as a devaluing gauntlet.The first book I can think of that explicitly questioned the colonial underpinnings of fashion studies, Re-Orienting Fashion (2003), was published less than two decades ago. In 2016, the book's primary coeditor and member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF), Sandra Niessen, reappraised the state of the discipline:As a historian of fashion, dress, and the body with expertise on African dress and fashion (Akou 2011), contemporary Islamic fashion, and working-class histories of dress in the United States, I agree with Niessen: We have made some progress, but fashion studies as a discipline has hardly been transformed. This is disheartening, especially when I think about the cultural importance and tremendous creativity of sartorial expression in many African and African diaspora cultures. As a graduate student, I never had to justify the value of studying African fashion because my advisor was Joanne Eicher (2022). Most beginning scholars are not that lucky.Listening is critical for decolonizing fashion studies, but it is not enough. Like art history, the study of fashion is about material culture; it cannot be fully understood through images alone. Fashion studies is also about people and places that support fashion practices— photographers, bloggers, designers, makers, fashion magazines, models, retail stores, etc…. Scholars can (and do) study contemporary practices, but what about the histories behind them? How do we know that African fashion changes? What is happening now that is different from ten or fifty years ago? As explored in Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices (McGregor, Akou, and Stylianou 2022), one of the reasons that fashion studies is so mired in Eurocentrism is because fashion collections in museums so rarely include examples of fashion from Africa or from other non-Western cultures. Instead, traces are scattered in other kinds of collections—categorized as art, trade goods, and “ethnographic” artifacts. For example, in my own study on the history of Somali dress, I did not find a single artifact in a fashion collection; everything was held by museums of art and natural history. Similarly, collections of African art in museums often include elements of dress such as textiles, jewelry, and masks, but rarely do curators attempt to include contemporary fashion or to represent individual fashion designers in their permanent collections.Transforming museums—whether by pulling these traces of fashion histories back together or by making fashion collections more inclusive—will not be easy. It is not easy for museums in Europe and North America to build trust among potential donors in Africa and the African diaspora, especially when so few curators are people of color. It is not easy for museums (anywhere) to justify their budgets when governments and nonprofit organizations have so many other pressing needs to address. Wealthy funders can have interests that are sharply different from scholars and museum visitors; sometimes they resist the most basic reforms.Just like African scholars and makers of fashion deserve to be heard, African fashion deserves to be seen in museums. True, systemic transformation of fashion studies and fashion collections will be a tremendous challenge. Listening is essential, but change is going to be limited until we change how we curate and access collections.

The first history of the deaccession of objects from museum collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum practice. Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works—formally remove objects from permanent collections—with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that deaccession is always wrong—and “deaccession apology”—when museums justify deaccession by finding some fault in the object—as symptoms of the same misunderstanding of the role of deaccessions in proper museum practice. He chronicles a series of deaccession events in Britain and the United States that range from the disastrous to the beneficial, and proposes a typology of principles to guide future deaccessions. Gammon describes the liquidation of the British Royal Collections after Charles I's execution—when masterworks were used as barter to pay the king's unpaid bills—as establishing a precedent for future deaccessions. He recounts, among other episodes, U.S. Civil War veterans who tried to reclaim their severed limbs from museum displays; the 1972 “Hoving affair,” when the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold a number of works to pay for a Velázquez portrait; and Brandeis University's decision (later reversed) to close its Rose Art Museum and sell its entire collection of contemporary art. An appendix provides the first extensive listing of notable deaccessions since the seventeenth century. Gammon ultimately argues that vibrant museums must evolve, embracing change, loss, and reinvention.

The article briefly gives the history of the creation of the Azerbaijan National Museum of Art, one of the largest museums in the country. The museum has a rich collection of Russian, Western European, Eastern and Azerbaijani art. The collection has been formed throughout the existence of the museum, but its foundation was laid back in the Azgosmusey. A certain part of the collection is made up of exhibits transferred to the museum during the USSR period, a cultural policy that relied on the education of the masses, regardless of nationality and region. A descriptive description of the exhibition activities of the museum is given, in which both collections of Russian and foreign museums were exhibited in different years. In various years, the museum hosted exhibitions of the fraternal republics, as well as China, India, Iran. After each exhibition, the museum’s collection was replenished with new exhibits. The museum constantly held and held personal exhibitions of representatives of various schools of painting in Azerbaijan. The country’s artists are proud that their paintings are exhibited and stored in one of the country’s major museums. In the context of the article, a special place is given to the work of the first theater artist R.Mustafayev, whose name the museum bore for many decades, and whose works are kept in his collection. Unfortunately, the name of this talented artist is little known to the younger generation, although his contribution to the development of national scenography and the protection of architectural monuments is invaluable. Thanks to his artistic flair, the performances “Koroglu” and “Arshin Mal Alan” designed by him have been successfully staged on the stage of various theaters. Тhe analysis of his work is an important thematic contribution to the history of the study of the Azerbaijan National Museum of Art.

In this illustrated book Christine Guth examines the intimate relationship between art collecting, the tea ceremony, and business through the activities of Masuda Takashi (1848-1938), the highly charismatic director of the Mitsui conglomerate whose opulent life and passionate pursuit of art continue to influence new generations of aspiring business magnates in Japan. An elaborate social ritual in which the worlds of business and art collecting intersected, the tea ceremony guided Masuda in amassing the finest collection of Sino-Japanese art in the early Japanese industrial era. Guth's exploration of his aesthetic ideas deepens our understanding of not only the formation of the canon of Japanese art but also the role of art in the ideology of early modern Japan. At a time when there were few art museums in Japan and Japanese art was becoming internationally known, Masuda's tea gatherings functioned as a salon where his colleagues, other collectors, and art dealers could view, discuss, and handle works of art. Under his influence, art collecting and mastery of the tea ceremony became integral parts of the business training and activities of Mitsui executives. Masuda's collection was rich in calligraphy, silk painting, lacquer, and ceramics, but it was especially noted for its Buddhist painting and sculpture. These works, which were dispersed after World War II, are now in museums and private collections throughout Japan and the United States.

Computer vision algorithms are increasingly being applied to museum collections to identify patterns, colors, and subjects by generating tags for each object image. There are multiple off-the-shelf systems that offer an accessible and rapid way to undertake this process. Based on the highlights of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, this article examines the similarities and differences between the tags generated by three well-known computer vision systems (Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and IBM Watson). The results provide insights into the characteristics of these taxonomies in terms of the volume of tags generated for each object, their diversity, typology, and accuracy. In consequence, this article discusses the need for museums to define their own subject tagging strategy and selection criteria of computer vision tools based on their type of collection and tags needed to complement their metadata.

The art collection of the Oriental countries is one of the unique in the Mikhail V. Nesterov Bashkir State Art Museum. It includes artifacts of such countries as China, Japan, Mauritanian Spain, Iran and Turkey. The history of the Bashkir State Art Museum began with the collection of Russian Art of the 19th and early 20th centuries gifted by Mikhail V. Nesterov. Thanks to active object donations from various sources in the 1920s and 1930s, the structure of the Nesterov museum collection became much broader than just the art of Russia. It is precisely in those years that the collection of Oriental art began to form. Despite the lack of its focus, art pieces that came from various sources are of great interest and demonstrate the artistic culture of different Eastern countries.

Comparative analysis of insect control by nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide in museum, archive and herbarium collections

The research considers the process of preserving the ethnocultural heritage of the Shors in Russian museums. Problems of ethnic cultural heritage preservation in the modern context are becoming more important due to the fact that the elements of heritage are rapidly being lost and cannot exist. The research determines that museum collections describing the traditional culture of taiga hunters-gatherers, i.e. the Shors, are dispersed in the museums of such cities as St. Petersburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Novokuznetsk, Osinnikov. Items collected on the territory densely populated by the Shors from the end of the 19th century to the present are converted to museum status by inclusion in the collections of city museums. Studying the history of creating the museum collections in the Russian museums will solve the problem of preservation and presentation of cultural heritage disappearing in modern terms. The research describes the process of converting the immovable cultural heritage items to museum status by means of their translocation and exhibiting in Scansen-like museums located near large cities.

Contrary to other forms of heritage (i.e., art collections), archaeology is based on allegedly objective data and is, therefore, particularly suitable to support ideological narratives on the past. Its scientific nature, combined with the proximity between its subject, material findings, and the cultural heritage of certain groups, entails that its history is key to understanding the interactions between science and its public. From an historical analysis that highlights the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, participation and narration of heritage, we can move on to reconstruct a critical approach to museums, collections, and cultural heritage in the society of the present and the future and re-imagine the role of history of science in this complex process.

The article is focused on the communication with children with special educational needs. The main topic is alternative communication with children with sensory disorders and multiple disabilities. It explores the phenomenon of communication, citing current definitions developed by a number of authors, which place the emphasis on different aspects of this complex and multilayered process, with a special focus on alternative communication with the groups of special needs children mentioned in the title.The issue is investigated from a special pedagogical and from a social perspective.The author is especially interested in the exploration of the multiple strata of communication (the universal, functional and specific levels). Apart from the different forms, contents, methods and means of communication (the last of which is most commonly discussed in Bulgaria), the article is focused primarily on the important methodological issues related to this topic.One of these basic questions of methodology is the attempt not to place at the center of this process its bi-directional nature, its algorithm or code (sign language, Braille writing system, etc.), but instead to focus on the personalities of those involved in the interaction, their initiative, relationship and goals manifested in different communication situations (mutual influence, emancipation and therapy). Particular emphasis is given to therapy, i.e. the way of influencing the communication behavior of children with sensory disorders and multiple disabilities. It is not viewed as a unilateral process (stimulus-response), but as an interactive one, based on mutual influence. The relationship between the communicators is of utmost significance.Communication is characterized by a number of specific features. Those can mostly be found in the specificity of the communication situations (for example the interactive situations in the following pairs of communicators: deaf – hard of hearing; deaf – deaf; deaf-blind – deaf, etc.), in the presence of an intermediary (for example a sign language interpreter) and above all in the personalities of the communicators. They change the quality of communication. It is for this reason, and not just because of the different means of communication, that this interaction is defined as “alternative”, or more precisely, it is an alternative to the communication of children without disabilities.Based on the analyzed information, the author formulates a number of inferences and recommendations. The main conclusion is the following:When discussing alternative communication with children with special educational needs, the focus should shift from the specific means of communication towards the equally socially important quality of the complex process of communication, which is centered on the personality of the handicapped child.