FRESH IDEAS: The value of museums

From New Criterion: "The persistence of museums' central role as vessels of culture is made even clearer in the context of what has been happening in the Mideast in recent years, with ISIS destroying the treasures of Mosul, and of Khorsabad, and so on. Tens of millions of people have expressed their outrage.

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“The vast majority of these people probably had very little notion of what Ancient Mesopotamian art was, but they understood that a huge limb had been hacked off of mankind’s cultural family tree. That instinctive lament for human culture was expressed worldwide, but the fact remains that in the rooms of our museums we still have many branches of that cultural family tree.”

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