Just to move tjis topic on to something that Jay has made me think about
again and which may be of interest to museum list. Maybe Jay I would
advocate the defacement of buildings-although I agree with you on the
fundamentals really -there can be peculiar circumstances.

One of the issues that got the heritage business talking around 1994
election period was what was going to happen to the monuments? I don't
if you guys also have the perception gained from bad movies and intense
documentaries  based in Eastern Europe of the change in regime being
accompanied by massive tearing down of the monuments of the old.
Very little of that has happened here-which is a great relief given how
much it would cost-although we do have a Naming Commission which
has renamed a few streets and squares mainly to Nelson Mandela Drive.
I was glad for another readon-I think that it is very important that the
monuments to th eleaders of apartheid and their heritage as they saw it
continue to stand as reminders to us and to future generations of where
we come from and where we sould be going. But I am not sure that I am
totally against changing what some of these monuments do and that
might mean 'defacing' them from some people's point of view.

Anyway I don't how much museums are involved in monuments
elsewhere but I thin its an interesting debate. I know there are many
people with very understandable reasons for having these things pulled
down-besides of course the aesthetic -many  are extremely ugly!

Kathryn