Word: unesco
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...foreign entertainment products while subsidizing their own. French officials, who believe such protectionism is essential for saving cultural diversity from the Hollywood juggernaut, once condemned Steven Spielberg's 1993 Jurassic Park as a "threat to French identity." They succeeded in enshrining the "cultural exception" concept in a 2005 UNESCO agreement, and regularly fight for it in international trade negotiations...
...dead and understandably so. The Peony Pavilion, one of the most famous Kunqu works, consists of 55 scenes, and a performance can last more than 20 hours. Witnesses to such a grandiose relic should worry less about falling asleep and more about slipping into a coma. When, in 2001, UNESCO declared Kunqu a "masterpiece" of the world's "intangible heritage" it seemed less like an honor and more like an epitaph...
...idea for a World Heritage List was hatched in the late 1950s, when the ancient Abu Simbel temples in Egypt were being threatened by a small dam. Frustrated by the Egyptian government's lack of action to protect the ancient buildings, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), launched a worldwide campaign that saved the temples by relocating them to higher ground. Today, the process is a good deal more official than that - almost like the Oscars of the environment. Any country is eligible to send in a list of nominees for protection. The candidates are then independently...
...Once a place is inscribed on the list, it not only benefits from the media attention and tourist revenue that such notoriety can bring, it also becomes eligible for a piece of UNESCO's preservation fund. In 2001, the world recoiled when the Taliban destroyed two 6th century, 150-ft. statues of Buddha carved into the mountainside in the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan. Since it was inscribed on the list, the site has received more than $4 million to help with reconstruction and to hire a sculptor to re-carve some of the damaged stone. "Countries are under...
...wonder then that the exhibition's organizers aim, with the support of unesco (and, one presumes, violence permitting), to repatriate these treasures by 2016 to a museum they hope to build atop the ruins of the ancient Gazan port of Anthedon. Curator Marc-André Haldimann sees the project laying a foundation for a future of tolerance. "It reminds us that Gaza is not the deadlocked prison that it is today," he says, "but, as it was-the window of the world...