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By
our cultural heritage correspondent Ivor
Firman
VISITORS
to the
New
Acropolis
Museum
in Athens, due to open in September,
will be issued with extremely
powerful long-range 'art binoculars'
(right) to enable them to view the Parthenon Marbles in London
when
standing on a specially designed
viewing platform hundreds of feet up
on the top floor of the new Acropolis Museum.
High-altitude
breathing apparatus
will also be provided. |
art binoculars
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Faced
with age-old intransigence from the British
Museum, whose
director Neil MacGregor refuses to
let his marbles go back to Athens,
the Greeks needed a novel solution. "This is the only way we can
allow our visitors to see the Marbles," said Greek Culture Minister Dave
Praxiteles. "It's true, they're
not exactly reunited, but at least
this way if you screw up your eyes
and stand on tiptoe and look
really, really hard, you can just
see the left ear of the Horse of
Selene over there in
Bloomsbury. We're ecstatic."
Earlier this year British
Museum
director Neil MacGregor mesmerized
visitors to the Hay Fever Festival
in Middle England with his evangelical vision of "A
glorious New Enlightenment with the British
Museum at its epicentre, a
cornucopia overflowing with the world's
cultural treasures, including my
Elgin Marbles owned by our beloved Lord Elgin and
never by the Greeks because the
Turks sold them to us legitimately, so
there."
Meanwhile, the sensational art journalist Martian Bypass, who
writes every story in The Mart
Newspaper each month, has reported that
the remaining marbles on the
Acropolis will be covered in
bubble-wrap and rolled down the hill
to their new home in the
Acropolis
Museum.
"The Mart Newspaper can reveal," wrote Mr Bypass, "that
this highly
dangerous and incredibly risky and
hugely irresponsible operation has
been adopted with absolutely no
forward planning and is a terrible way
to treat the surviving masterpieces
of one of the world's greatest
monuments and not what my dear friends, er, I mean contacts, at the British
Museum
would have done. But this is
just what we would expect from a
barbarous nation such as the Greeks."
Mrs Fredi Mercouri is 108.
Ivor
Firman
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