Thursday, December 11, 2008

Final Presentations - Preserving Venetian Heritage

The last presentations took place today at the Venice office of UNESCO.  Once again, the high tides affected the attendance (we had to move the presentations back 1/2 hour to wait for the acqua alta to subside), but those who did attend were high caliber people, including Dr. Carla Toffolo, the secretary of the Private Committees for the Safeguard of Venice, Dr. Emmanuele Armani, one of the premier restorers of works of art in Venice, representatives of UNESCO and other friends and students.  We combined two presentations back-to-back.  The first was on the development of a roll-out plan for the non-profit organization we call PreserVenice, which will take on the challenge of moving towards active preservation of endangered pieces.  The team put together an outstanding presentation which explained how they designed a fully-interactive web site to showcase our multimedia catalogs of almost 4,500 pieces of art that are visible from the streets and canals of Venice, and how the site could be used to solicit donations to begin the process of actually preserving this incomparable collection that has no equals in the world.  The richness of the data allows our sophisticated algorythms to instantly graph the condition ratings of each piece and thus automatically calculate the estimated cost and priority of each restoration.  If a donor is attracted to a particular piece he or she can "adopt" it by donating to its restoration fund.
In the spirit of the Venice 2.0 initiative, we sincerely hope that this project will mark the final stage of an effort that started in 1990 and will thus herald the beginning of a new era that will result in the active restoration of Venetian Public Art.  All we need now is seed funding to hire a part-time administrator of the fledgling organization so the restorations can start in earnest.  Click here to donate now to the seed fund.
(actually we can't accept donations now, so invest your money in a Madoff  "Ponzi account" and watch it grow while we get our PayPal account activated ...)