No sketch please, we’re British | Peter Goddard
http://tinyurl.com/2jaaa
“On Saturday, Jason Witalis was happily sketching an ancient head at the Eternal Egypt exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum. It would help him remember what he’d seen, he says. ‘I get more out of it.’ Then a ROM guard came up and stopped him flat. Busted. The 29-year-old Toronto intern architect was nabbed by the ROM no-sketching police, caught red-handed with his crudely drawn outline of Mentuhotep II, founder of ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, in his hot little hand.”

When drawing art is outlawed, only outlaws will draw art | Franklin Einspruch
http://www.artblog.net/index.php?name=2004-05-28-07-44-drawing
“If I were in Toronto, I would get every artist in town I could to go down to the ROM, sit down in the British Museum exhibition, and draw. Call it a Draw-In. The fact that the British Museum is willing to cut off this ancient method of learning for the sake of its intellectual property rights, or whatever this is about, is vile. It is anti-art. It is vandalism against our tradition. “

A Bonfire of the Vanities | Eric Gibson
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110005138
“Art disasters normally have a visceral impact. Such incidents as the looting of the Baghdad Museum last year and the ravaging of Florence’s art treasures by floods in 1966 set the mind reeling at the thought of pieces of man’s cultural patrimony permanently lost or damaged. This time, though, I was strangely unmoved. It’s not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It’s just that the work of these artists–as of all contemporary artists–is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one’s existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can’t quite see it as a body blow to civilization.[…] another critic, Danny Serota (no relation to Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota), suggested the burned-out warehouse be preserved as a ‘shrine’ to conceptual art. You’d expect this kind of ditsy hyperbole from art dealers (who are paid to be enthusiastic) or from Mr. Saatchi himself. Instead it’s come largely from art critics. “

Is this Britart’s ground zero? | Adrian Searle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1225496,00.html
“They will see it as divine retribution, and perhaps feel a pleasurable little glow, not from the radiated heat from the fire, but of schadenfreude, especially as so many of the destroyed works are in the collection of Charles Saatchi. A rumour circulating yesterday suggested that Saatchi has been trying to buy the site, though one can’t imagine exactly why, and it is being talked of as Brit Art’s ground zero. A generation has not quite gone up in smoke, though there are those who will see it thus. ”