Greece’s hopes of getting the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles stolen 200 years earlier by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin are being revived, squeezing American museums to send back some wrongfully-acquired treasures.
In a report, The New York Times pointed to a number of examples of some of the United States’ most prestigious museums having to give up long-held artifacts and displays as the mood has changed about how they were obtained.
That includes New York’s renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose curator Thomas Hoving admitted in earlier times he was a kind of rogue going after prizes for the institution.
That, he said, included spiriting a Romanesque relief from a Florentine church out of Italy with the help of a dealer who, Hoving said, often stashed objects under a mattress in his station wagon.
“My collecting style was pure piracy,” he boasted, “and I got a reputation as a shark.” The Indiana Jones hat doesn’t fit today even with the fifth and last film in the series coming out.
The Parthenon Marbles seem destined to be in limbo forever with on-again, off-again reports about deals and secret deals to try to get them returned to their home in Athens, but in the US, museums are already sending goods back.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles returned three precious terra cotta figures to Italy. The Denver Art Museum shipped four antiquities back to Cambodia. The Smithsonian Institution returned 29 Benin bronzes to Nigeria. And the Manhattan District Attorney’s office seized 27 looted artifacts from the Met, which are headed back to Italy and Egypt, the paper noted.
“I do have sympathy,” Elizabeth Marlowe, Director of the Museum Studies program at Colgate University told the paper: “for museum directors and curators who were trained under different ethical norms and now find themselves in a situation where they very publicly have to rethink the ethical norms they are operating under. That said, ‘It’s time to step up, gentlemen.’ It’s a different landscape.”
For decades, and centuries in some cases, museums around the world stocked their display areas with stolen treasures, goods plundered from colonies or of dubious origin, and looked the other way because of their value.
They’re doing with resistance and claiming – as has the British Museum – that the pieces they’ve gotten are so important to the world that they belong to the world, but should be kept in their institutions.
“We have moved the goalposts,” said Kate Fitz Gibbon, Executive Director of the think tank Committee for Cultural Policy about the new thinking that nonetheless now has curators and directors scratching their heads in uncertainty.
Περισσότερα at thenationalherald.com
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