Traveling Exhibitions

The November 16 issue of the New Yorker has a long article by Ian Parker (not accessible in full online) about Zahi Hawass, Egyptian archaeologist and head of the country's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), which oversees all Egypt's historic sites and artifacts. Hawass has been extremely influential over the past decade (at minimum) in controlling the direction of Egyptian archaeology and has worked extensively with the National Geographic Society and with television networks to produce many specials. The part that caught our eye, as museum folks, was a paragraph about the Tutankhamun exhibition (recently in Atlanta) that he put together with Arts and Exhibitions International:

In 2005, Hawass accepted a proposal from A.E.G., the sports-arena owner and events organizer, to take Tutankhamun back on the road, with an explicit ambition of making money. Andres Numhauser, the exhibitions executive, works for Arts and Exhibitions International, an A.E.G. subsidiary, and he told me that Hawass has "professionalized exhibitions," adding, "Egyptians don't appreciate what he's doing." A.E.G. agreed to pay Egypt for access to a few dozen of its thousands of Tutankhamun artifacts, and to involve the National Geographic Society, whose name would go on the poster. Any museum that took the show would be given a share of the ticket proceeds, but it would have to stomach the loss of almost all curatorial control. In San Francisco, for example, the de Young Museum was able to veto items in the exhibition's accompanying gift store, and it ruled out a tissue box whose papers exit through the nose in a Pharaoh's mask. Beyond that, the museum was the provider of floor space. John Norman, the C.E.O. of Arts and Exhibitions International, said, "We lay it out, we bring all the elements--the cases, the text panels, the lighting, everything is ours. Where they have input is in the label copy. Their curator might want to say the same thing that's on that label but in a different way, and we give them the opportunity to edit. And there might be a two-per-cent change."

Just an interesting look at what's involved sometimes with a blockbuster show.