The British may have purchased the Elgin Marbles legally – they existence in the British Museum remains however a relic of an imperial age that the world has since moved on from. Now is the time for the British Museum to once more lead the museum world by showing that restitution of artefacts can be a win/win situation for the institutions involved.

From:
Boston Globe

Imperialism loses its marbles
July 9, 2009

THE GREAT museums of the world are filled with artworks that have been plundered from somewhere else, sometimes after being stolen several times over. There is no chance that all the kidnapped statues and paintings in those secular temples of culture will be returned to their original homes. Nevertheless, the British Museum would be making a gesture of respect to Greece, the wellspring of Western culture, if it returned the statuary that came from the Acropolis in Athens and is now known as the Elgin marbles.

The opening last month of a much-lauded museum in Athens, situated within view of the Parthenon, has revived an old quarrel over where those figures belong that were torn from the frieze and pediment of the ancient temple to Athena. Lord Elgin was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire when he began removing the statues in 1801, with the consent of Ottoman authorities. From a Greek perspective, the official of a foreign empire with no title to those monuments had pilfered them with the permission of another imperial power that had no right to give them away.
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This interview with Sharon Waxman indicates that the Getty’s reaction to her recent book on looted artefacts has not been particularly positive, due to her coverage of some of the institution’s practises.

From:
Boston Globe

Sharon Waxman: On the trail of ‘Loot’
Posted by David Beard, Boston.com Staff December 2, 2008 07:22 AM

Sharon Waxman, a former Washington Post and New York Times culture reporter, appears in Cambridge on Wednesday to speak about “Loot” (Times Books), her account of the US and European plunder of Third World antiquities — and the return home for some of the art. She spoke from her home in Los Angeles.

Q: Your last book, “Rebels on the Backlot,” was about six Hollywood bad boy film directors of the 1990s. Could “Loot” be any more different?
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Another review of Sharon Waxman’s book on the looted antiquities that fill many museums of the West.

From:
Boston Globe

Golden fleeces
For centuries the West has plundered the treasures of the ancient world; now some nations are fighting back
By Michael Kammen
November 9, 2008

LOOT:The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
By Sharon Waxman
Times, 414 pp., illustrated, $30

Have you ever wondered why the Rosetta stone (so crucial to our understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics), discovered by Napoleon’s army in 1799, is situated in the British Museum? Or why a Babylonian stele called the Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known legal code in human society (“an eye for an eye”), is located in the Louvre in Paris? Or how the beautiful bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti ended up as the showpiece of a Berlin museum?
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As times change & projects such as the New Acropolis Museum are now so far underway, more & more people think that now is the time to reconsider the issue of the Elgin Marbles inside the British Museum.

From:
Boston Globe

Part of the Parthenon
8/15/2003

AFTER 200 years in British captivity, it is time for the gods and heroes looted from the Parthenon to return home. The dispute over whether the Seventh Earl of Elgin acted properly when he had the carved marble statues hacked off the temple “for their own protection” in 1801 has enlivened the worlds of arts and politics for decades. The pop star Melina Mercouri’s personal crusade to return the marbles defined her term as Greek minister of culture. Both Keats and Byron waxed poetic upon viewing them. Now, as Athens readies itself to host the 2004 Summer Olympics, the Elgin Marbles should be part of the pomp.

The British Museum, which holds 247 feet of carved frieze and 17 statues, insists it will not return the marbles to Greece, even for a loan. But the Greek government is forging ahead with a $100 million Acropolis museum to house them. As with all things related to the marbles, the museum construction itself is causing controversy, with critics claiming that the site excavation is disturbing other archeological treasures. But the new museum — assuming it is completed on time — should answer a chief claim of the British: that Greece cannot properly care for the marbles.
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