February 11, 2008
Where will the restitution claims end
This article puts forward the view, that some in the US museums establishment think the current wave of restitution claims is going to far. I would have thought though that amongst that particular group of individuals, many of them would consider any restitutions as a move to far. The fact remains though that guidelines need to be laid out to broadly define what can & can’t be returned – on the other hand, the museums would not be in this situation now if they had been more careful with determining the source of many of these pieces in the first place.
From:
Boston Globe
Finders, keepers
As museums ship ancient treasures back to the countries where they were found, some are now saying: Enough.
By Drake Bennett
February 10, 2008ON THE FIRST floor of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, in the early Greek art galleries, there is a long display case filled with Athenian ceramics. In one corner, partway up the linen backing, are two holes, a couple of inches apart, where a shelf holding a small, 2,500-year-old oil flask was once attached. Upstairs, in the Imperial Roman galleries, a group of marble busts and statues has been rearranged after the departure of a 6-foot-tall marble statue of the Roman empress Sabina. Ten Greek pots and one carved marble fragment from Imperial Rome are also gone from the museum’s collection.
more stories like thisAll the pieces were given to the government of Italy, and are now part of a blockbuster exhibition, in Rome’s Quirinal Palace, made up entirely of pieces alleged to have been looted and smuggled out of Italy. The show’s title, “Nostoi” – from a lost epic poem recounting the perilous homeward voyages of Greek heroes after the Trojan War – is a nod to the labors of the Italian culture ministry and police, whose campaign of persistent arm-twisting, public criticism, and criminal prosecution secured the return of the 68 artifacts in the show, each now the property of the Italian government.
These returned objects are only the most visible recent fruits of a powerful movement aimed at moving some of the world’s most prominent ancient treasures from the hands of foreign museums and collectors back to the so-called source countries. Along with Italy, the governments of Greece, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, China, and Cambodia, among others, have pushed to reclaim prized artifacts from collections around the world.They have tightened their laws governing the export of antiquities or intensified the enforcement of existing laws and international agreements; they have made impassioned public cases on the world stage.
These governments argue that to allow such objects to remain abroad as trophies only encourages the continued pillage of their national patrimony. Their position has won broad moral support and increasingly become the norm among academic archeologists, who see ancient objects as historic artifacts inseparable from their place of discovery. It has forced major concessions from great museums around the world, including the MFA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The British Museum is under persistent pressure to return the Elgin Marbles, its famous set of sculptures from the Parthenon.
But as one museum after another negotiates deals, and prosecutors all over the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world’s cultural inheritance.
“What’s at stake,” says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, “is the world’s right to broad and general access to its ancient heritage.”
Cuno, the former head of Harvard’s art museums and someone often mentioned as a possible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the retiring director of the Metropolitan Museum, is this spring publishing a book-length argument against returning cultural artifacts, “Who Owns Antiquity?” Cuno, who is among the most vocal and prominent voices in the debate, argues that laws meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they’re found are wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving collectors and dealers into the black market. They also present an existential threat to great “encyclopedic” museums like the MFA or Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the full breadth and diversity of the world’s cultural history in one place.
Such arguments have triggered fierce responses, not only from source country governments, but from archeologists who see in the recent repatriations and prosecutions the best chance for protecting the fragile sites from which antiquities are too often looted. Ricardo Elia, chair of the archeology department at Boston University and an expert on the problem of looting, describes Cuno as an “aesthetic fundamentalist” willing to ignore ethical and archeological values to get his hands on pretty objects. Cuno’s argument, many of his critics charge, is simply an endorsement of plunder.
Many curators and collectors are more cautious in their public remarks than Cuno. But the clash between Cuno and his critics is a battle between two very different philosophies, one that sees antiquities primarily as art, the other casting their value in terms of the historical information they provide. How the argument plays out will determine the way human history is dug up, studied, and displayed. And it will determine, too, what it means to own a piece of the ancient past.
The dispute over where the world’s antiquities belong goes back centuries, but recent years have seen an intensification of repatriation campaigns, and a string of victories for the source countries. Among the returned items in the “Nostoi” exhibition is the Euphronios Krater, a dramatic Greek bowl that Italy had been demanding back from the Metropolitan Museum almost since the museum bought it in 1972, for $1 million, from an art dealer now on trial in Rome for conspiring to sell looted antiquities. A year ago, Greece won the long-sought return of a gold wreath and statue from the Getty Museum.
In addition, federal officials are investigating an alleged Asian antiquities smuggling ring that sold pieces to a few Southern California museums and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. And last month, the oldest antiquities dispute of them all, over the Elgin Marbles, was reignited when the Greek-Cypriot billionaire owner of easyJet added his voice and resources to the battle to reclaim the famed sculptures from the British Museum, where they have been displayed since being prized off the Parthenon 200 years ago.
The problem with these seemingly laudable efforts, according to Cuno, is that they’re not really about the artifacts, but about politics. The young governments of Greece and Turkey, he points out, used their antiquities, and the laws restricting their export, as a way of forging a national political identity. The Greek government’s dogged campaign to recover the Elgin Marbles is one example. The Turkish government’s claim of ownership over the relics of ancient Kurdish culture found within its national borders – objects that, if owned by the Kurds themselves, might fuel their separatist ambitions – is another.
In many cases the nations asserting rights to artifacts have little in common, culturally, religiously, artistically, or even ethnically, with the civilizations buried beneath them. Modern Peru, for example, was built in the vacuum left by the systematic destruction of the Inca civilization, whose legacy the country now claims. “It is a stretch of the imagination,” says Cuno, “to link modern Egypt to ancient Egypt, modern Greece to ancient Greece, modern Rome to ancient Rome, communist China to ancient China.” Nonetheless, countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, China, and many others have laws that make any antiquity found on their soil automatically the property of the state.
The demands of this nationalistic system, its critics say, can sometimes overrule the best interests of the artifacts. In a 2006 essay in the New York Review of Books, the philosopher and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that such laws have even destroyed antiquities. Soon after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, Appiah pointed out, it was a UNESCO treaty prohibiting the removal of antiquities from their country of origin that prevented concerned scholars from rescuing pre-Islamic artifacts before the Taliban, branding them idolatrous objects, destroyed them.
“Would the ideologues of cultural nativism…find solace in the fact that these works were destroyed by Afghan hands, on Afghan soil?” Appiah wrote.
Even at museums that have made substantial changes to their acquisition policies, there is discomfort with some of the language of repatriation, and with the sweeping nature of some source country laws. Kimerly Rorschach, the director of Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, is seen by archeologists as someone who listens to their concerns. She is quick to describe her alarm at the problem of looting and smuggled artworks. But she is also critical of the idea that, as she puts it, “All objects from these ancient civilizations must be distributed to people who descend from them – or who may not descend from that civilization but inhabit the same geographical region.”
Better, many in the museum world insist, to let some of these treasures find a home in encyclopedic museums – cosmopolitan institutions where the age-old interpenetration of cultures is brought into relief – rather than restricting them to more homogenous national museums.
“We should recognize that a great deal of knowledge, cross-fertilization, and exchange can come from objects moving across borders,” Philippe de Montebello wrote in an essay, “Whose Culture Is It?,” published in the Berlin Journal last fall.
Archeologists don’t deny the value of cross-border cultural exchange, or of bringing ancient treasures to the widest possible audience. The problem, they argue, is that the lucrative antiquities market inevitably creates incentives for looters. According to archeologists who study the issue, a significant portion of artifacts on the market today, and in the collections of many major museums, were looted – illegally dug up for the sole purpose of profit. David Gill, an archeologist at Wales’s Swansea University, examined the sales of Egyptian antiquities from Sotheby’s from 1998 to 2007 and found that 95 percent of the objects could not be traced back to the place where they had been dug up. Not all of those pieces, he says, were necessarily looted, but many were.
For archeologists, the problem with looting is not simply that it is stealing, but that it destroys archeological sites, erasing irreplaceable information. A funerary jug scrubbed clean and presented for sale to a museum has far less to offer an archeologist than one found in the ground, where everything from its location and positioning to its contents and the composition of the soil around it – in short, its context – can offer clues to the sort of culture that made and preserved it.
To illustrate the point, Brian Rose, president of the Archaeological Institute of America and an archeology professor at the University of Pennsylvania (and a curator at the university museum), gives the example of a site called Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Under excavation since 1994, it is the oldest known temple complex in the world, predating Stonehenge by 7,000 years. If it had been looted, and its pillars and carvings brought onto the market with no context, Rose argues, “they probably would have been branded as forgeries” because their existence so fundamentally challenged archeologists’ understanding of the earliest eras of human history.
The value of the current system to archeologists is that source countries like Italy and Greece, whatever their motivation, have proven better protectors of dig sites than museums have. “I think the nation-states are trying to do a good job of maintaining and protecting their antiquities,” says Malcolm Bell, an archeology professor at the University of Virginia and the leader of a dig at the ancient Greek colony of Morgantina, in Sicily, the source of a collection of looted silver recently returned to Italy from the Met.
To Bell and other archeologists, the recent repatriation campaigns are less a form of national chest-thumping than part of a healthy long-term shift in archeology, away from treasure hunts run by museums and wealthy explorers and toward long-term digs managed in cooperation with host countries. Most of the laws and international accords governing the antiquities trade tacitly acknowledge that standards have changed over the years, and only target objects that may have been looted in recent decades.
Cuno, for his part, believes that it’s the laws themselves that encourage the black market in antiquities, much as 90 years ago Prohibition spurred the rise of the Mob. Private collectors are a fact of life, he argues. Since source country export restrictions make it so much harder to legally purchase antiquities, dealers and collectors are driven into the black market. Cuno would like to see a loosening of those laws to allow for a larger licit trade in antiquities. Perhaps, he suggests, source countries could arrange to set aside some portion of the artifacts unearthed on archeological digs for sale, or they could bar only those antiquities they were willing to buy from the owner from leaving the country. As the legal market grew, he predicts, the black market would correspondingly shrink.
To archeologists, this position is unconscionable. Some even wonder if the world would not be better off without a market in antiquities. In this view, the fundamental problem is that antiquities can be private property. Why not, they argue, treat antiquities the way we treat African ivory, as something that, with a few exceptions, can’t be bought and sold at all?
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
- The archaeologist’s viewpoint : February 6, 2008
- James Cuno, preservation versus access & cultural identity : February 1, 2008
- James Cuno’s controversial new book : June 5, 2008
- “A new wind is blowing” for the reunification of the Elgin Marbles : March 31, 2008
- Has James Cuno become a “nationalist retentionist”? : July 5, 2008
- The alarm of some institutions at growing numbers of restitution claims : February 13, 2008
- Collecting versus cultural heritage : November 18, 2006
- Symposium on collecting antiquities : May 4, 2006
DR.KWAME OPOKU said,
02.12.08 at 6:51 pm
HOLDERS OF ILLEGAL CULTURAL OBJECTS ALARMED BY GROWING DEMANDS FOR RESTITUTION.
It is simply amazing how Eurocentric and selfish many of the arguments of the defenders of plunder and stealing of other people’s cultural property are. The opponents of restitution seem completely oblivious of the interests of countries trying to secure the return of their cultural objects that have been taken away by force or through dubious means. At the risk of repeating some of the points I have already made elsewhere, I shall comment on a few points mentioned in the article in the Boston Globe, February 10, 2008 by Derek Bennett. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/10/finders_keepers/. It is often not easy to tell whether Bennett is presenting his own view point or simply reporting the views of others.
When the museums were receiving the various items now under their control, nobody ever set limits to their greed by saying “enough” but now that the owners of the artefacts are claiming them back, the museums cry out loudly “enough”. But how much has really been returned? In reality, apart from a few items from the US museums and universities, not much has been returned. The British Museum, the Louvre, Musée du Quai Branly, the Ethnology Museum, Berlin, Pergamon Museum, Berlin, the Ethnology Museum, Vienna and a whole lot of museums in Europe and the United States have not indicated the slightest intention to return any of the thousands of stolen objects in their museums and their depots. So where is the ground at all for saying enough? Not a single African art object has been recently returned by any major museum. Italy, the lonely exception returned the obelisk stolen by Mussolini from Axum.
“Cuno, who is among the most vocal and prominent voices in the debate, argues that laws meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they’re found are wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving collectors and dealers into the black market.” Is this statement to be taken seriously? Is it really being suggested that countries that enact laws and regulations to control and reduce plunder and stealing of cultural objects are mistaken and that these measures are “wrongheaded” and “counterproductive”? Who else can determine what is useful for protecting Italian cultural objects if not the Italian Parliament? Should they leave this to some museum directors across the Atlantic who can estimate what is productive? Art collectors being driven by laws “into the black market?” Other illegal activities could as well be said to be driven “into the black market” by the laws and therefore the relevant laws should also be abolished.
The regulatory laws on plunder and illegal sales are said to constitute “existential threat to great “encyclopaedic” museums like the MFA or Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the full breadth and diversity of the world’s cultural history in one place.” We now hear of “encyclopaedic museums”. This sounds less imperialistic than the infamous “universal museums” but as the article shows they are the same type of museums with same kind of ambitions and characteristics. There is here only a semantic change which sounds less frightening and voracious. When the museums in New York, London, Paris and Berlin pretend to provide an opportunity for all to see the world’s culture at one place, they are thinking of westerners mainly. They are not thinking of Africans or others who have the greatest difficulties in obtaining visas to visit western countries. Are we not part of this world? A man living in Lagos, Bamako, Benin City and Yaounde surely will not agree that he can see at one place “the full breadth and diversity of the world’s cultural history in one place”. He definitely cannot go to the European embassies in his country requesting visa because he wants to see the African artefacts in Europe. The embassies will throw him out.
To cast the debate on restitution and control of plunder as “a battle between two very different philosophies, one that sees antiquities primarily as art, the other casting their value in terms of the historical information they provide” is to narrow unnecessarily the greater debate between those who believe one can hold on to the stolen arts of others, irrespective of their provenance and those who argue that stolen cultural objects should be returned to the places and peoples for whom they were originally intended. It is this larger discussion which has brought movement into the question of possession of stolen cultural artefacts and which will continue to unsettle many European and US American museum directors for a number of years.
Bennett states that “some prominent scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where they are – that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world’s cultural inheritance.” I do not know exactly what history is being referred to here but it sounds strange to my ears that when a country claims what belongs to it, that country or its people are said to have false reading of history. It is possible that in some specific situations it may not be possible to determine precisely which people made which cultural artefacts but as far as African countries and indeed, most countries outside Europe, are concerned there have not been many doubts about the history of the stolen artefacts. No one ever doubted that the Benin bronzes were made by persons of Benin origin or that the Asante gold objects were made by Asantes for Asantes.
The history concerning the forcible seizures in colonial days is well-known. So where is the “false reading of history?”
What is this unspecified “damage to the world’s culture” which will occur if the movement for restitution gains strength? Who appointed the museums of New York, London, Paris and Berlin as guardians of the “world’s culture” with the right to keep the cultures of others? When these objects were being removed nobody saw any danger to the cultures of those countries. Now that they demand the return of their cultural objects, western museum directors see danger to the “world’s culture”. Are those countries not part of the “world’s culture”? Why should the repossession of their own cultural goods be a damage to “world’s culture” when the initial, often violent, removal was not? Would any museum director dare to tell the people of Ethiopia or Benin such a story?
“What’s at stake,” says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of
Chicago, “is the world’s right to broad and general access to its ancient heritage.” Which world is the director of the Art Institute of Chicago writing about? It seems he is thinking of only the western world. I do not think he has the man from Kwadaso or Zaria in view. A claim is made for the worldto have a right to its ancient heritage but those living in the countries where these objects are found do not, it seems, in the eyes of the museum director, have any such rights. He should go and announce this to UNESCO and the United Nations General Assembly which have been passing resolution upon resolution urging the return of cultural objects to the countries of their origin.
“In many cases the nations asserting rights to artefacts have little in
common, culturally, religiously, artistically, or even ethnically, with the
civilizations buried beneath them. Modern Peru, for example, was built in
the vacuum left by the systematic destruction of the Inca civilization,
whose legacy the country now claims. “It is a stretch of the imagination,”
says Cuno, “to link modern Egypt to ancient Egypt, modern Greece to ancient Greece, modern Rome to ancient Rome, communist China to ancient China. Nonetheless, countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, China, and many others have laws that make any antiquity found on their soil automatically the property of the state”.
What does one say in the face of such a blatant general statement? Can one seriously argue that “communist China” has nothing in common with “ancient China”? So where did Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai and the leadership of the Communist Party spring from? Do they not have anything in common with the history of China? Do they not share language, culture, ethnicity and art with ancient China? Can one understand modern China without the history of China?
Are the holding museums and their governments better related to these ancient civilizations? Do they have better connections with them than the modern governments of the claiming countries? Can the holding museums more legitimately represent the ancient civilizations? Those fighting to retain stolen or illegal objects in their museums can say whatever they like but I think there must be some limits.
“They limit the number of people who can see the objects…” The argument that by returning artefacts to their place of origin one limits the number of persons who can see them is often repeated but it is not solid. First of all, it is often assumed that because London or New York has a greater population than an African village more people will see an object in the western city than in an African village. But does this apply to an African city like Lagos with its millions? It is also assumed that the great number of visitors in western towns all go to museums. This is not true. If numbers were the decisive factor, we should send all cultural artefacts to China and India who have large populations that are actively involved in festival and other cultural activities. A more important point is that most of the time many of these museums have more objects than they can adequately display and most of the stolen items are often in cellars, quite often in the original packing, not yet opened! So how do many persons see these objects?
“In a 2006 essay in the New York Review of Books, the philosopher and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that such laws have even destroyed antiquities. Soon after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, Appiah pointed out, it was a UNESCO treaty prohibiting the removal of antiquities from their country of origin that prevented concerned scholars from rescuing pre-Islamic artifacts before the Taliban, branding them idolatrous objects, destroyed them.” This is one of those statements that leave one breathless and really shattered, wondering if such pronouncements should be taken seriously at all. We are used to hearing that the UNESCO or the United Nations are not very efficient in specific circumstances where we would have liked them to intervene energetically to prevent an impending disaster. Those bodies work on the basis of principles which have largely been elaborated by western countries and adopted by the international organizations. When things do not go the way certain States want, they are blamed. But did anyone ever allege that a UNECSO Convention prevented any group of scholars from a course of action? Is it realized by all that a UNESCO Convention does not belong to UNESCO as such but is a tool for the signatory States of the Convention which are also responsible for its implementation and, in the final analysis, for its interpretation?
“The problem with these seemingly laudable efforts, according to Cuno, is
that they’re not really about the artifacts, but about politics. The young
governments of Greece and Turkey, he points out, used their antiquities, and the laws restricting their export, as a way of forging a national political
identity. The Greek government’s dogged campaign to recover the Elgin
Marbles is one example„
This is a very remarkable argument. When artefacts were removed under colonial or imperialist rule, nobody remarked it was political but now that independent governments are reclaiming these artefacts, those demands are considered to be political. It is said they are wanted for forging national identity. If there is any substance in this allegation at all, I would argue that it is the persistent and arrogant refusal of the holding countries that make some of the claimed objects appropriate as national causes. Often the refusal to return these cultural objects involves a direct or implied insult from the holding museum or country to the claiming country. How often have we heard that these objects are better looked after in the holding country than in the claiming country? Inefficiency and corruption are often imputed to the claimants. It is therefore not at all surprising that these claims become national causes for all, even for those who really do not care much about cultural objects. Are the nationalists only in the claiming countries and not in the holding countries? Are the Greek claimants for the Parthenon marbles more nationalistic than the British holders of the Elgin Marbles?
I hope, for the sake of those opposing restitution, that they will in future present better arguments than those presented so far and, in any case, better than those reported in the article in the Boston Globe.
Kwame Opoku. 12 February, 2008.