Museums

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has been Exhibit A of museums-on-the-go during the expansionist and sometimes boundary-pushing and populist tenure of director Thomas Krens. Krens made "Guggenheim" an international brand name for modern and contemporary art and architecture while sometimes riling purists by bringing shows such as "The Art of the Motorcycle" and an exhibition of Armani fashions to the flagship Guggenheim Museum in New York.

They read like dispatches from the controversy over Proposition 8, the current ballot initiative that would ban marriage between same-sex couples in California. "Homosexual Marriage?" asks one magazine headline in large white type. Another takes a more aggressive approach: "Let's Push Homophile Marriage," accompanied by an illustration of muscled men in amorous poses. But a closer look at these magazine covers reveals something rather unexpected.

Iraq's National Museum, which was looted after the U.S. captured Baghdad in 2003, will remain closed to the public for up to two more years until security in the capital is better, the director said Monday. Director Amira Eidan said that reopening the museum to the public must be the "very last step in Baghdad's journey to absolute normalcy." "If everything goes well and there are no unexpected developments, then it can reopen after between one and two years from now," Eidan said.

The keepers of history aren't all about looking back in time. Curators of museums large and small are embracing the Internet as a way to move older works from storage to cyberspace -- a sort of permanent store room unaffected by moisture and pests, and one that anyone can enter. At the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, workers are busy digitally photographing each work in their care from various angles and loading the files onto a computer.

A delivery driver drops a stack of packages in the lobby of the Los Angeles Sports Museum. What's in them? "I don't know," said Gary Cypres, founder and curator of the downtown museum that will open to the public on Nov. 28. "Let's find out." And, with boyish delight, he tears open the top package. It is a baseball for the 65-year-old businessman's already substantial Joe DiMaggio collection.

For half a century, life in Downey revolved around the 167-acre NASA site in the middle of town. It was there, in airplane hangars erected on former bean fields, that the city's men and women designed and built the spaceships that took the first Americans to the moon. Then came 1999, when Boeing, which was operating the site at the time, moved its operations out of town.

The sight may be a little shocking, Paul Boneberg warned a visitor. And it was. There, removed from tissue-paper wrappings in a storage box, were the wingtip shoes, striped suit and white shirt that gay activist and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk wore Nov. 27, 1978, the day he was assassinated. Dark bloodstains remained visible around the shirt collar, and small holes -- from bullets -- could be seen in the suit's blue and gray material.

Here at the Museum of the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea, it's as if the clock stopped 55 years ago. "I feel like I am right there on the front lines," said Wang Binyan, a 23-year-old teacher. "I can feel what the Chinese soldiers felt. In this place, Americans are the enemy." The museum in this provincial city on the North Korean border tells a personal version of the Korean War, one that casts U.S. foreign policy and military tactics in a decidedly negative light.

The Russian government has set up a commission to review the legality of the Soviet Union's sale of artworks from the country's museums before World War II, the director of the State Hermitage Museum said Monday. Of the hundreds of paintings sold from the Hermitage Museum in the late 1920s and early 1930s, about 20 of them eventually went to help create the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In bygone days, holiday wish lists were simpler. There was no alphabet soup of Nintendo DSes or Xbox 360s. No plug and play. Not even batteries required. Back when grandma -- or probably great-grandma -- was a child, there were dolls and teddy bears, rocking horses and toy soldiers. Playtime involved imagination and child-driven propulsion.