Victor Rabinovitch

When motion picture ­technologies blossomed in the early twentieth century, filmmakers around the world set up small studios. In Halifax, for example, the Canadian Bioscope Company got to work and released Evangeline, the first of six features, in 1914. But by the 1930s, the feature film industry in this country was a thing of the…

It is hard to forget the excitement and drama when, in 2002, the Royal Ontario Museum displayed an ancient ossuary, a funerary bone box made of limestone, in a special exhibition. This was no ordinary receptacle: carved into one side was an Aramaic inscription identifying the bones as those of “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” For religious and secular visitors…

We are in the midst of a revolution in the design and management of the world’s museums and galleries. They are being refashioned by borrowing technologies and techniques first seen in Hollywood and theme parks. Cities are using museums as anchors for urban renewal; they hire starchitects and promote their buildings as attractions in themselves, sometimes as important as the works they…

How should a public institution behave when some of its core values and procedures are challenged by the communities it is intended to serve? And should this behaviour be different if the institution has a purely cultural mandate, operating in a not-for-profit manner? The recent history of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, and other museums in Canada and…

Sadly, we know how it ends: on a street in Ottawa in 1868, a bullet to his head, his skull so damaged that a traditional death mask was not possible. (A cast of his hand was made instead.) The eloquent voice of Thomas D’Arcy McGee was silenced. While admirers tried to keep his story and words…