But I don't think that would go over that well with Congress and the Executive Office of the President.
The previous entry, "National Archives photo "retouching" is another example of the tension between National Ideology and Memory and Inquiry in the funding of national museums, archives," discusses the recent incident with accurate interpretation of history and events at the National Archives.
But I was primed to write about that incident because early last week I came across a different and surprisingly article about the International Spy Museum, and criticism of its exhibits on the CIA and torture ("Spy Museum will revamp torture exhibit after Congressional backlash," Washington Business Journal, as originally reported on by BuzzFeed News, "The Spy Museum Is Now Planning To Overhaul Its Controversial Torture Exhibit").
The Spy Museum is a private museum--originally it was a for profit venture but now it's a nonprofit. It recently relocated to a site at L'Enfant Plaza ("Will Tourists Follow the International Spy Museum to L'Enfant Plaza," Washington City Paper), and it is one of the only admissions-based museums in DC that seems to be able to compete with the free museums ("D.C.'s paid museums retool to boost attendance," WBJ).
But in this case, (Democratic) members of the Senate Intelligence Committee:
... in December wrote that the the exhibit “misrepresents the CIA’s torture program, sanitizing depictions of how techniques were applied and suggesting that torture is effective in terrorist attacks,” the senators wrote on Dec. 18, according to a letter published by BuzzFeed. The letter went on to point out that the 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on the program showed that it was not effective.It's a rare instance of an action by Congressmembers calling for a more accurate representation of history, events, and evidence-based research, rather than to sanitize it.
offtopic, retail rents in the US
ReplyDeletehttps://on.ft.com/36grRCj
Good piece. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYou've been mentioning this broad issue for awhile, and what it will do to commercial property valuations and the effect on government revenues/budgets.
There was an article in the Real Deal (sometimes appears in my Google news feed) about a property that had 100% rental, but all the tenants were shutdown, just stuck in having to pay rent, and to break the agreements, which were enshrined in the overall mortgage, they had to go into special servicing. It is a high profile SoHo property. (SoHO has another issue, apparently it's mostly illegal to have retail uses, leftover from the arts-loft zoning).
Companies are going to have to be willing to take on non credit tenants.
And, properties are going to have to be revalued, with the retail proportion of the property being valued less.
... before I used to argue that just divvying up CAM etc. by s.f. put more of those costs onto the retail tenants in an office building. The concierge and other services weren't there for the benefit of the retail spaces.