Word: abu
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...director in 2001. Armed with a vision of the Louvre as a beacon of culture that is both accessible and global, he has set in motion a dramatic opening up to the outside world. So far, that includes signing a controversial deal to create a Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, and staging exhibitions of the museum's treasures in places like Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Kobe, Valencia and Macao. He's also overhauling the museum's internal workings to make it more efficient, more financially robust and better able to cope with a surge in visitors - up 60% since...
...historian by training, Loyrette comes from a family of well-known French lawyers and spent more than two decades at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, including seven years as its director. Some of what he's doing at the Louvre is experimental, he acknowledges - including the Abu Dhabi project, which he calls "a leap into the unknown." People often ask if he's planning to brand museums elsewhere, but Loyrette says he won't even contemplate other such projects until it's clear how well this one goes. (The Louvre Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open...
Fumaroli's association isn't the only one to be concerned about that. The Abu Dhabi deal alone will bring the Louvre $900 million - $600 million for the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years, and the rest for services that include lending up to 300 works. (The total deal amounts to $1.3 billion; some other French museums participating in the government-backed project will share the rest of the proceeds.) When the deal was struck last year, an Internet petition declaring "our museums are not for sale" quickly drew several thousand signatures, including those of well-known...
...Loyrette has also built out the tiny three-man fund-raising department that Rosenberg set up in the late '90s into a full-time operation with 19 staffers. And the Louvre is about to launch a U.S.-style endowment fund - the first in France - using the money from the Abu Dhabi deal to ensure it can finance a bevy of ambitious projects in the future, including one that would revamp the entrance under the pyramid to make it easier for visitors to access the museum and get their bearings...
What about those Abu Ghraib photographs? In "King Leopold's Soliloquy," a fulminating essay he published in 1905, when he was a very cantankerous 70, Twain imagines the ruler of Belgium pitying himself for the inconvenience of photos showing natives of the Congo whose hands have been cut off by Belgian exploiters. In the good old days, Leopold complains, he could deny atrocities and be believed. "Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible Kodak--and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that...