January 21, 2004

Is the campaign for the return of the Marbles “ill informed”?

Posted at 1:28 pm in Elgin Marbles, Marbles Reunited

This article seems to dwell too much on the effort Elgin made to remove the marbles from Athens, rather than the simpler (& more relevant question) of what is the right thing to do now.

From:
Daily Telegraph

This marbles madness
(Filed: 21/01/2004)

A new bid to return the Elgin marbles to Greece is ill-informed and has appalling implications for all our museums, says Richard Dorment

Anyone can understand why a patriotic Greek might want the Elgin marbles returned to Athens. It is a harder to fathom the motivation of British supporters of what, on the face of it, is a hopeless cause.
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January 20, 2004

Greece wants Elgin Marbles returned in time for Olympics

Posted at 1:58 pm in Elgin Marbles, Marbles Reunited

Greece wants the Parthenon Sculptures returned to Athens in time for the Olympics later this year. They are stepping up their campaigning to try & make sure that this happens.

From:
ABC News (Australia)

Greece wants Elgin Marbles returned in time for Olympics
The World Today – Tuesday, 20 January , 2004 12:54:00
Reporter: Fran Kelly

PETER CAVE: Greece appears to have won over the British public in its latest bid to have the Elgin marbles returned in time for the Olympics this year, to Athens.

Polling shows three out of four Britons believe that the priceless Greek antiquities ripped from the Parthenon by a former British Ambassador to Constantinople at the start of the 19th century should be returned to Greece.
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Can Greece be trusted with the Marbles?

Posted at 1:52 pm in Elgin Marbles, Marbles Reunited

The recent launch of the Marbles Reunited campaign & the flood of editorial pieces following it has stirred up controversy in the letters pages of many newspapers.

From:
The Times

January 20, 2004
Who owns the Elgin Marbles?

The present Lord Elgin says that Greece cannot be trusted to look after the Marbles. Should we keep them?
THE question conjures up Lord Elgin, from an era of privileged appropriation, versus the Greek nation, natural guardians of aboriginal Western civilisation, in unseemly dispute over the toy cupboard: no surprise that polls indicate popular support for sending back the sculptures. Yet, of course, it’s not that simple. Both sides claim moral and legal priority (hardly surprising, given the ill-recorded and disputatious circumstances of what occurred in Athens two centuries ago). Yet history does not help. We should instead be asking ourselves, what do we really care about now?

Who cares about ancient art or archaeology? Not, apparently, the Greek Government, for whom it is more important to build an empty museum to house the sculptures than it is to recover evidence that could have furthered understanding of the people who created the Parthenon, which was destroyed when the museum was built.
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January 19, 2004

Would returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece really mean whitewashing Europe’s past

Posted at 2:06 pm in Elgin Marbles

According to this piece, returning the Parthenon Sculptures would mean the re-writing of European History. Surely though, another way of seeing the process is that it is merely adding a new chapter to their existing history – a change in decision due to evolving philosophies in an ever changing world?

From:
The Guardian

Comment
History in the making
Returning the Elgin marbles to Greece would mean whitewashing Europe’s past
Salvatore Settis
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

It took a consummate actress like Melina Mercouri to realise that archaeology has a part to play in politics. As Greece’s minister of culture in the 1980s, she launched a vibrato appeal to the British Museum for the return of the Parthenon, or “Elgin”, marbles. Similar requests had been put forward since the dawn of Greek independence in 1835, but the issue gained real resonance after Mercouri’s appeal.
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Debate continues over return of Parthenon Marbles to Greece

Posted at 2:01 pm in Elgin Marbles, Similar cases

The launch of the Marbles Reunited campaign has considerably raised the profile of the debate over reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, not just in the UK, but also in the international press. In many instances, other countries can draw parallels with other similar issues that are affecting them more directly.

From:
The Times of India

VIEW
Campaigners demand return of Elgin marbles to GreeceAdd to Clippings
MONDAY, JANUARY 19, 2004 12:00:24 AM

No nation has exclusive claim to our common heritage

The campaign to return the Elgin marbles, housed in the British Museum for over two hundred years, to their original home in Athens , is ill-advised.

In today’s globalised world such moves reek of parochialism and the pro-Parthenon activists who have organised themselves into a group called “Marbles Reunited” should know as much.
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January 18, 2004

Why should the Parthenon Sculptures stay in Britain?

Posted at 2:10 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, predictably argues that the Elgin Marbles ought to stay in Britain.

From:
The Times

January 18, 2004
Oi, hands off our marbles!

The right place for the Elgin marbles is the British Museum, says Neil McGregor, its director, as a campaign is launched to repatriate them
The Parthenon is a ruin, a ruin now in an atmosphere so polluted that no major work of sculpture could responsibly be left attached to it. This may seem self-evident, but in the light of some of the claims and arguments put forward this week about the future of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum it clearly needs to be restated. Since its creation in the 5th century BC, the Parthenon has been a classical temple, a church and a mosque.

In the course of its history the building and its sculptures have suffered greatly. The worst damage was inflicted by a huge explosion caused by a direct hit from Venetian gunfire on an Ottoman Turkish gunpowder dump in 1687. The roof was blown off and the building, which had hitherto been almost complete as a structure, was wrecked.
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January 17, 2004

Who was Lord Elgin?

Posted at 1:42 pm in Elgin Marbles

As context to the arguments over the return of the Parthenon Marbles, this article looks at who the current Lord Elgin is. Unfortunately though the course of history has been such, that whether or not he wanted to do anything to resolve the situation today, he would be unable to.

From:
The Independent

Lord Elgin: Defender of aristocratic adventure and national treasures
By Tim Luckhurst
17 January 2004

At Broomhall House, ancestral home of the Earls of Elgin, ancient Greek stelae or grave markers adorn the walls. The relics, decorated with carved figures, are the bits of the Elgin Marbles the British Museum did not want. They were brought home to Fife by the 7th Earl in 1816 and remain at Broomhall, now the home of his direct descendant, Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, the 11th Earl of Elgin and Chief of the Clan Bruce.

His Lordship will be 80 next month. He walks with a limp caused by a leg wound received in the Normandy landings of 1944. He might be forgiven for taking things easy, but when it comes to defending the family name that is not in his nature.
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January 16, 2004

Neil MacGregor & the Enlightenment

Posted at 1:51 pm in British Museum

Neil MacGregor wants the British Museum to be seen as a Universal Museum. The rest of the world’s opinions should also count for something though.

From:
Financial Times

The Revolver: Enlighten up
By Peter Aspden
Published: January 16 2004 16:47 | Last Updated: January 16 2004 16:47

There is a new T-shirt on sale in the British Museum shop. The slogan it bears – “If I am not better, at least I am different” – is cleverly modulated to reflect the tone of our age: a hint of narcissism (I need to tell you something about myself on the front of my T-shirt) tempered by a fashionably relativist conclusion (I am equal to you but not the same. God bless humanity, in all its shapes and forms).

But the most striking thing by far about the slogan is the name of its author. Forget Moschino, Katharine Hamnett and Dolce & Gabbana. Stick to slumming it in the Guggenheim and the Royal Academy, Mr Armani. It seems the fashion world is finally ready for the Jean-Jacques Rousseau revival.
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January 15, 2004

Did Greece fail to protect the Elgin Marbles?

Posted at 2:21 pm in Elgin Marbles, Greece Archaeology

According to the current Lord Elgin, Greece has failed to protect the Elgin Marbles from pollution. This line of reasoning though fails to accept that Lord Elgin could not anticipate such things happening in the future & that this formed no part of his original reasoning for their removal. The Sculptures that remained on the Parthenon were there because it was very hard to remove them without destroying the integrity of the monument (something that Lord Elgin did not worry about). Surely if this was really the concern of the British, then they should have lent expertise to preserve them insitu, rather than ripping them from the building for their own benefit?

From:
The Herald (Scotland)

Web Issue 1919 – January 15 2004
Greeks ‘failed to protect marbles’
GRAEME SMITH and CATHERINE LYST
January 15 2004

THE Greeks cannot be trusted to look after the 2500-year-old Elgin marbles, which were taken from the Parthenon almost two centuries ago, Lord Elgin said yesterday.
Greece wants the marbles returned to their home in time for this year’s Olympic Games and has been backed by a campaign in Britain that has won the support of MPs and public figures including Dame Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave.

The British Museum, which bought the marble sculptures from Elgin and houses them, has refused to hand them over despite the campaign, which has been running for more than 40 years. Lord Elgin yesterday said the Greeks had failed to protect their artefacts from pollution and the marbles should not be given back.
They were taken from the Parthenon by Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, for his mansion, Broomhall in Fife, which was designed in the classical Greek style.
At the time the earl was British ambassador to the Ottoman empire and the Turks, who had conquered Greece, granted him permission to remove the sculptures, which were of no cultural significance to them.
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Eighty One percent of Britains support loan of the Elgin Marbles

Posted at 2:17 pm in Elgin Marbles, Marbles Reunited

A survey commissioned by the Marbles Reunited campaign shows that more than eighty percent of people in Britain would support the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens in the form of a long term loan.

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

Thursday January 15, 2004
Marbles: Good news and bad

As new poll data published yesterday showed that 81 percent of Britons back a long-term loan of the Elgin, or Parthenon, Marbles to Greece, Athens yesterday admitted that the new museum in which it proposes to display the sculptures will be far from completion during the Summer Olympics.

Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos said the 94-million-euro project for a new museum in the Makriyianni district under the ancient citadel – already some 19 months behind schedule – fell foul of court challenges brought by archaeologists and local residents, who argue that the building will irreparably damage important antiquities found on the site.
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Will Greece’s campaign for the restitution of the Elgin Marbles be sucessful?

Posted at 2:14 pm in Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Some in Athens are against the construction of the New Acropolis Museum. In many cases though, this is more of a political isue, brought about by people who are not seeing the situation objectively.

From:
Sydney Morning Herald

Greek fight to win back marbles might be in vain
By Fred Bernstein
January 16, 2004

After almost two centuries of frustration, Greece had a new plan: to use the 2004 Summer Olympics, during which the eyes of the world will be on Athens, to pressure Britain into returning the missing sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon.

Known as the Elgin Marbles by those who say they belong to Britain (Lord Elgin acquired them from the Ottoman Turks, in 1806), and as the Parthenon Marbles by those who say they were stolen, they have become the world’s most famously contested works of art. But so far, all the diplomacy has not succeeded in getting them back to Athens, even for a short-term loan.
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Marbles Reunited campaign launch

Posted at 2:10 pm in Elgin Marbles, Marbles Reunited

The Marbles Reunited campaign draws on high profile supporters to raise awareness for the issue of the Parthenon Marbles.

From:
The Guardian

Group Demands U.K. Return Elgin Marbles
Thursday January 15, 2004 12:16 AM
By BETH GARDINER
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) – Activists launched a fresh bid Wednesday to persuade the British Museum to return ancient sculptures from the Parthenon to Greece, saying even a loan would be a huge step forward.

The activists, whose group is called Marbles Reunited, said Greece had suggested the British Museum retain ownership and control over the so-called Elgin Marbles but display them on long-term loan at a museum being built at the Acropolis in Athens.
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