The outrageous nomination choked the American art community but obviously NOT England’s art critics. The four selected artists are Yinka Shonibare, Jeremy Deller, Kutlug Ataman, and the duo Langlands and Bell. The infamous Bin Lade’s inspired piece of art is called “The House of Osama Bin Laden”. It is an installation/collage of photos and video from Afghanistan made by Langlands and Bell. The London’s Turner Prize is considered by many as one of the most prestigious contemporary art awards. Yet, to many art lovers and connoisseurs, it is viewed as controversial. To avant-garde Londoners, the Turner Prize is very a propos .Last year, it was won by transvestite potter Grayson Perry. The committee and organizers of the Turner Prize said that Bin Laden’s inspired piece is an artwork which we should look upon as "personal investigation of the social and cultural make-up that defines different societies.”

Who's to blame?

A move is afoot to blacken the museum's name. This may not be just. “AS SOON as there's a government that decides that others should do this job, they're welcome,” says Donny George, the research director at the Iraq National Museum. He thus acknowledged his own vulnerability to the de-Baathifying zeal of Pietro Cordone, the Italian diplomat whom the Americans recently put in charge of Iraqi culture. Visiting foreign archaeologists expect top people from the board of antiquities, Mr. George included, to be pushed out. But they are suspicious about the reason: “The Americans are covering their ass,” suggested one. American forces were criticized  for not preventing the theft of thousands of pieces, including some treasures of Mesopotamian culture. They took three days to make good on a pledge, delivered to Mr. George, to dispatch a protective force. Now some American officials are insinuating that the museum staff handed the premises over to Iraqi troops, who used them as a defensive position. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York homicide prosecutor who has been carrying out an inquiry, attributes American slowness to the fact that the museum had been turned into a “combat zone”. In a report he put out this week, Mr Bogdanos said that the area around the museum was secured by a tank platoon only after “fierce fighting”. Not fierce enough, it would seem, to deter the dozens of journalists who greeted the tanks as they hove into view. Mr. Bogdanos claims to seek the lost treasures, not scalps. But his insinuation that keys to important rooms in the museum were removed from a director's safe seems designed to suggest an inside job. In his report, he notes that his efforts to recover lost items have been hampered by the links between the museum staff and the Baath Party, and by the museum's incomplete record-keeping system.

Mr. George, whose good English and personable manner make him the museum's public face, endeavors to answer such allegations. His assertion that the museum's archive is adequate and complete is endorsed by foreign colleagues. He maintains that the safe was opened by a safebreaker, whose keys were found on the premises. For the foreign archaeologists who now throng the museum, the idea that their colleagues could have colluded in its desecration is too appalling to contemplate. They tend to take a relaxed view of the Baathist credentials of Mr. George and the head of the antiquities board, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim; no one in a senior position, they say, was unqualified. Since the looting, nine works of art from the public galleries, and hundreds more from the stores, have been returned, many from repentant locals. That still leaves a lot of missing artifacts, and Mr George fears that the finest pieces may have already left the country. And what has happened, or is happening, to museums and sites outside Baghdad? On American insistence, the remit of a UNESCO mission to the country has been severely curtailed. The mission is confined to Baghdad and its environs, so delegates have not been able to see more distant archaeological sites that, local officials report, have been severely looted by armed gangs. And Mr. Cordone has declined to allow journalists to accompany him on a helicopter trip he plans to make to some of these plundered sites.

FRUSTRATED archaeologists and museum curators are collaborating on legal moves and a name-and-shame campaign to try to publicize many of the antiquities that were stolen from the Iraq National Museum during the fighting in Baghdad last month, and make them more difficult to sell both at home and abroad. Daily radio broadcasts in Iraq, together with entreaties to local neighborhood imams, have resulted in the return of a number of small pieces to the museum. But the looters that the authorities would most like to see apprehended are those who entered the museum in teams, armed with glass-cutters, duplicate keys and the expertise required to distinguish between fakes and the real thing. Some of the museum's rarest works were targeted: a tall Sumerian masterpiece known as the Warka Vase, and the ivory Lion of Nimrud. One stolen sculpture weighed 160kg and would have taken five men to carry away, leading many people to believe that the works were stolen to order.