Category: Belgium

100 sexless Artists – Would You believe Italians to be as Puritan as Americans?

It’s a pity for the English language readers that Gotz Primke of Le Gourmand writes in German only: He really offers good content and inspired me for this topic:

Charlier's penis of Christo, which comes with clue "Wraps in very special things".

Belgian artist Jacques Charlier has put together a veritable gallery of portraits based on conceptual analysis and personal interpretation of the “artistic attributes” of major representatives of modern and contemporary art, thus enabling, among other things, a humorous and satirical re-reading of recent art history. He had submitted 100 posters “100 sexes d’artistes” containing 100 more or less sexually tainted parodies of those 100 Artists for the 2009 Venice Biennial. His idea was to offer a clue and let the public guess who he was referring to. This photo points to Christo who wraps everything. However, both the curators and the mayor of Venice refused the posters as they feared the artists involved would be offended. Jacques interviewed all artists but one. They all reported to feel no offense.

Jacques protests with a site against this censorship and with an official vernissage (or is it venissage in this case?). See the above video.

The Brussels Museum of Modern Art backs his protest with an exhibition until September 13, 2009.

Now I wouldn’t have thought Italians to be as puritan as Americans. Would You?

This brings back memories of another protest at a Venice Biennial the one of 2005:

2005-september-Art-en-Route-in-Venice-IMG_0519

That of the Guerilla Girls against the “male chauvinist pigs” still ruling the Venice Biennial…L’Histoire se repete… Lol: yesterday it was 500 years ago that John Calvin was born…a sign of Calvinism in Venice maybe?

New Face for Historic Hotels of the Benelux

Annemarieke van der Velden

Hospitality veteran Johan Neppelenbroek had set up Historic Hotels of The Benelux as a split off from Erfgoedlogies in order to enable this group of hotels to join the international network of Historic Hotels.

As of August 1, 2008 Annemarieke van der Velden (see photo) has taken over Johan’s position. Johan’s investment in the label has been taken over by the Eden Hotel group. Currently the Eden Group manages 17 hotels and 9 restaurants in The Netherlands. With this acquisition Eden is preluding on its expansion plans outside The Netherlands in due course.

According to insiders the fact that a single hotel group takes over the management of the association will not lead to a loss of member hotels.

Historic Hotels of the Benelux has 33 member hotels in The Netherlands en 17 member hotels in Belgium.

Historic Hotels of the Benelux is a member of Historic Hotels of Europe

Historic Hotels of Europe is a partner of Historic Hotels of America

I wish Annemarieke a lot of success with this new venture.

Shortcut: A City Blog about European cities

Shortcut logo

Today I discovered the nicely written Shortcut, A European City Blog with a nice lay out. It writes about 17 European cities.

It used to write about upcoming events, but nowadays in true web 2.0 style it links through to Yahoo’s Upcoming.

A pity Shortcut don’t feature The Hague.

Go enjoy yourself!

Added July 1, 2007
I changed the URL as they have moved to another provider.

Dutch Erfgoed (=Heritage) Hotels changes name into Historic Hotels of the Benelux

ERFGOEDHOTELS OLD SITE

The association of Dutch Heritage hotels by the name of Erfgoed Hotels Benelux (erfgoed = Dutch for heritage) has changed its name into Historic Hotels of the Benelux. Its nice new brochure has already the new lay out. When everything goes all right, its old lay out of its website here above will change into the new lay out here below this week:

HISTORIC HOTELS BENELUX

Historic Hotels of the Benelux is a member of Historic Hotels of Europe.

Historic Hotels of Europe is a partner of Historic Hotels of America

Weekendhotel.nl and hoteliers.nl working together

The site Weekendhotel.nl was set up by Willem and Esme Vos: Willem has a background in travel and tourism and Esme in intellectual property law and Internet related matters.

We started Weekendhotel in April 2002 to help you find the best addresses for a weekend away. Like you, we became frustrated with typical booking sites that serve chain hotels desperate to dump their unsold inventory.

We were looking for something more personal and atmospheric, a site that would bring together the most charming hotels and B&B’s with character. Because we did not find such a site, we decided to create our own and weekendhotel.nl was born.

How they work is explained more in detail here.

In order to enhance the usability of the site Willem has built a simple inventory database for available rooms that each hotelier can keep up to date. Thus the user of the site can easily make a choice for a hotel to stay. The only problem is the maintenance of the data. The Hoteliers have to keep the inventory up to date almost daily or at least each time the inventory changes. This in itself is a nightmare for hoteliers of a small size hotel/B&B, especially when he has to allocate inventory over several sites where rooms can be booked on line…. Consequently the inventory of Weekendhotel is not always 100% up to date.

In 2005 a couple of graduates of a Dutch Hotel School have set up Hoteliers.nl (which is the same as Hoteliers.com) in cooperation with the Dutch Horeca Association to which association many Dutch Hotels belong, in order to create a possibility for hotels and B&B’s to be bookable on line. Both via the sites of Hotelier, but also via a link with Hotelier through their own site. The hotels pay a moderate monthly fee for the use of the site rather than the commissions they have to pay to the bigger portals. The site grows and works satisfactorily.

Weekendhotel.nl is more the content site and has details about approximately 1200 small Dutch and Belgian hotels and B&b’s and approximately 6000 unique visitors per day. Hotelier.nl is more the technically driven site that since inception has now approximately 600 participants including hotels belonging to chains or conglomerates.

Recently, the two have officially announced their cooperation whereby the site Weekendhotel.nl is linked with the inventory system of Hotelier.nl. If the hotelier wishes to have his property on both sites, he only has to maintain his inventory on the Hotelier.nl site.

I am glad with this new development to which, in the background, I could contribute a bit.