June 5, 2008
James Cuno’s controversial new book
James Cuno seems convinced (maybe because himself) that the power of museums to good in the world is all important & it should over-rule any minor things like who is the actual owner of artefacts & where they were acquired…
From:
Chicago Reader
Who Owns Antiquity?
In a controversial new book, Art Institute president James Cuno argues that museums should trump nations.
By Deanna Isaacs
June 5, 2008When I was a kid, the public library in my hometown of Minneapolis had a pair of real Egyptian mummies. They were displayed in glass cases and one was partially unwrapped, his head exposed. He was small (about my ten-year-old size) and shriveled, with gaping sockets where his eyes had been. A card said he’d been a priest who lived more than 2,500 years ago, and explained that during the mummification process his brains had been pulled out through his nose. I was mesmerized. Out of time and place, his eternal rest horribly violated (even by my gaze), he seemed to me to be an emissary from an amazing and previously unimaginable culture.
Those mummies, now on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, came to mind as I was reading James Cuno’s controversial new book, Who Owns Antiquity?, in which he rails against cultural property laws that have made it nearly impossible to legally export not only mummies but almost any relics from the countries in which they’re found. Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, contends that these laws, though regularly rationalized as a means to protect archeological sites, are actually about something else.