News
ICOM 2015 Annual Meetings - 30th Advisory Committee and 80th General Assembly
1. - 3. Juni 2015, Paris, Frankreich
ICOM Annual Meetings: Three days full of encounters and discussions for museum professionals
ICOM Österreich bei den Annual Meetings 2015
(re: Präsidentin Dr. Danielle Spera, li: Geschäftsführerin Mag. Elke Kellner)
Dr. Peter Keller, ICOM Treasurer
The month of June has arrived, bringing with it the ICOM Annual Meetings, once again. Over three days (from 1 to 3 June, 2015), museum professionals from around the world gathered in Paris to share their thoughts and approaches regarding the multitude of issues that museums are facing today. This year, participants had the pleasure of listening to French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, of the Institut Pasteur and Collège de France. Changeux has worked alongside museums for a number of years, as a supporter of the arts and through his research and publications on art and the brain. He opened the meetings on Monday, 1 June with a keynote speech entitled Beauty in the Brain: The Neuroscience of Artistic Creation.
On the same day, ICOM officially presented a new version of the Emergency Red List of Iraqi Cultural Objects at Risk to the press. This is an updated and enriched version of ICOM’s first emergency Red List on Iraq, published in 2003, and it constitutes a response from the international museum community to the violent events that have rocked the country in recent months, bringing about the destruction of world cultural heritage. The Emergency Red List for Syria (published in September 2013) and the one just published for Iraq are concrete tools intended to prevent looted objects from being illicitly trafficked.The Iraq Red List was officially presented to the press at the Louvre, in the presence of Fleur Pellerin, French Minister of Culture and Communication; Jean-Luc Martinez, President-Director of the Musée du Louvre; Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General; Hans-Martin Hinz, ICOM President; and Richard Stengel, U.S. Department of State Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. International experts who contributed to ICOM’s efforts to draw up the Red List were also in attendance.