MUSEUMS, an HBO Presentation by John Oliver

[IanG]

As others have noted above, this is a complex and nuanced issue but I do think we need to distinguish between the benefits of repatriation in theory and practice. Here's an extract from an article a few days ago in the London Times;

"A group of the Benin bronzes that Germany handed back to Nigeria have vanished into a private collection instead of being exhibited in a museum as promised."

It appears that shortly before Christmas the German foreign and culture ministers travelled to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to hand over 23 of the bronzes, on the understanding that they would be shown in a new museum. But after the handover the outgoing President Buhari of Nigeria passed them on to Ewuare II, the Oba, or traditional ruler, of Benin.

This has not gone down well. “What politicians thought of as the return of cultural heritage to the ‘Nigerian nation’ has instead turned into a present to a single royal family,” Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, professor emerita of anthropology at Göttingen University, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Cambridge University had agreed to return its bronzes on a similar understanding but has paused for now in light of this breach of promise.

Now, of course, something similar may not happen when items are repatriated. If the Elgin Marbles were returned, for example, Greece would house them in its wonderful new Acropolis Museum and display them to the public. But in many cases the 'source' countries to which items would be repatriated are ones with histories of instability and corruption and there is then a significant risk that, yes, they may have 'gone home' but they will no longer be in public institutions available for people to view and scholars to study but in private hands.

I do recognise that in many cases there are good arguments for repatriation but the issue isn't anywhere near black and white as this case shows.

[Al Kowsky]

Many thanks to Rand for posting this article & to Hrefn & IanG for their comments. There are many different ways to assess the the John Oliver presentation on HBO, but one thing remains certain, 99% of the antiquities in art museums & those sold by auction houses have been looted. At one time I had a sizeable collection of antiquities & most of these had been won from major auction houses. Over the last decade I have liquidated most of these antiquities through major auction houses, & only one auction house showed any real interest in the provenance of these objects, & that was CNG. On the subject of Benin bronzes, many years ago I won a Benin bronze from a major auction house in Santa Monica, CA, pictured below. It is a large & heavy urn, about 16 in. tall, & depicts the investiture of a chief, with all figures cast in high relief. The urn doesn't have great age but could have been made in the 1st quarter of the 20th century, & may have been used for sacrificial remains or the remains of an important person. The underside of the base had rotted away, & sometime after being exported, a piece of fabricated sheet copper was soldered to the underside to make it complete. I still have this urn & would feel uncomfortable about putting it up for auction today. Maybe I'll just let the executor of my estate dispose of it after I pass on 🤔....

The first photo shows the subject of investiture with an attendant on either side of him holding his arms. The other photos depict musicians celebrating the event. Note the man playing a flute has a stylized leopard head on his skirt. 

Edited May 17, 2023 by Al Kowsky
spelling correction

[Deinomenid]

On 5/13/2023 at 8:06 PM, JeandAcre said:

does a solid job of getting past his rhetorical excesses.

 

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-a-museum-just-a-trophy-case/ 

@JeandAcre good episode, thanks for suggestion though the section where he interviews the NY assistant  DA is disturbing. The guy's more nutty than I'd heard. No clear answers at all  other than a mantra  of  JUST RETURN IT, doesn't matter to  him to who - and to  invoke the fact that he's ex-army as a coverall  to show he's not naive is poor at best. I have quite a few ex-military  in my  family and  they  can be naive in areas outside their core skills, even  having seen some  horrible or worse stuff. To claim, as he does, that we cannot  even question his judgement  on antiquities because he served in Kosovo etc is  unnerving and a non sequitur. He was incapable of debate - everything was  just  black and white. 

 

[AETHER]

Tragic, this is a some what a tough decision for the British Museum to justify keeping the items, lots of politics, reputation and prestige on the line. 

The right thing to do, is return the item that have been looted barbarically.  However, shady loopholes and justifications seem likely to be on the horizon.

I would assume, sadly, that the first course of action for the Brits would be to stall, and let the story go away by itself.  

Really rough, but when you look past the tid bits, laws, and sides involved, looting, is looting, and wrong doings should be corrected. 

How important is this on a problem scale vs the many fucked up things going on in this world..... I guess we will see.

 

[JeandAcre]

On 5/14/2023 at 5:58 AM, IanG said:

As others have noted above, this is a complex and nuanced issue but I do think we need to distinguish between the benefits of repatriation in theory and practice. Here's an extract from an article a few days ago in the London Times;

"A group of the Benin bronzes that Germany handed back to Nigeria have vanished into a private collection instead of being exhibited in a museum as promised."

It appears that shortly before Christmas the German foreign and culture ministers travelled to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to hand over 23 of the bronzes, on the understanding that they would be shown in a new museum. But after the handover the outgoing President Buhari of Nigeria passed them on to Ewuare II, the Oba, or traditional ruler, of Benin.

This has not gone down well. “What politicians thought of as the return of cultural heritage to the ‘Nigerian nation’ has instead turned into a present to a single royal family,” Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, professor emerita of anthropology at Göttingen University, wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Cambridge University had agreed to return its bronzes on a similar understanding but has paused for now in light of this breach of promise.

Now, of course, something similar may not happen when items are repatriated. If the Elgin Marbles were returned, for example, Greece would house them in its wonderful new Acropolis Museum and display them to the public. But in many cases the 'source' countries to which items would be repatriated are ones with histories of instability and corruption and there is then a significant risk that, yes, they may have 'gone home' but they will no longer be in public institutions available for people to view and scholars to study but in private hands.

I do recognise that in many cases there are good arguments for repatriation but the issue isn't anywhere near black and white as this case shows.

This is a compelling story, for all the wrong reasons.  Naturally, the ideal would be for artefacts on this level to find a home in a national museum, of which I'm pretty confident Lagos has one.  The subtext should be that this is national patrimony.  That's what I'd dearly love to see happen to the earlier sculpture from Ife, despite its also being presided over by a continuous local monarchy.  That would be a truly regal response.

[John Conduitt]

A problem with repatriating objects to a 'nation' is the implicit idea that we have somehow reached an endpoint in nationhood, and the current setup is the 'real' one. On top of this, the inherent principle is that all current nations can be traced back to all previous iterations in a simple line of heredity.

The Elgin Marbles, despite regularly being used as the prime example of the crime, were not looted. Lord Elgin got permission from the local authorities to take them. They are therefore more rightfully the possessions of the British Museum than most of the Greek coins in everyone's collections. The problem with the Elgin Marbles, however, is that the 'nation' that gave permission was the Ottoman Empire. It can be argued that the Ottoman Empire probably didn't have the cutural interests of the future Greek state in mind, but they were the relevant authority at the time. If we weren't at the 'real' endpoint of nations then, why are we now?

It might be, sometime in the future, that the nation of Greece ceases to exist once more. After all, one of the arguments in favour of Brexit was that the EU is pushing for 'ever closer union' (as described in several treaties since the Treaty of Rome in 1957). One logical conclusion is that all the states within the EU will cease to exist, to be replaced by the EU nation. Greece has signed up to this many times. Greece, therefore, will be the same nation as France and Germany. Surely, France and Germany can keep hold of their Greek artefacts in anticipation of the fact.

The Benin bronzes were returned to Nigeria, with everyone expecting that to mean the 'nation' of Nigeria, only for the Nigerians to give them to the royal family. Given the bronzes adorned the palace of the Kingdom of Benin, their royal family clearly has more right to the bronzes than the Nigerian state. Yet everyone seems to be uncomfortable with that, as it means one privileged family gets to keep them all instead of the wider (and more socialist) cultural entity of 'the people of the Benin bronzes' (whoever they are). This brings forth the moral quandry that really we should give all our artefacts back not to any state, but to the wealthy families who owned them the first time, and who did plenty of suppressing, colonialising, killing, robbing and looting of their own.

Of course, if we do that, and even if we don't, a vast number of these artefacts will end up on the art market. Royal families eventually disperse and their descendants sell off the heirlooms. Museums can't afford to store every last bit of pottery, so they sell them, keeping an ever-smaller set of examples as history grows. What it comes down to is not culture, but money, and there are lots of reasons to distrust anyone looking for that.

Edited May 16, 2023 by John Conduitt

[JeandAcre]

21 hours ago, John Conduitt said:

A problem with repatriating objects to a 'nation' is the implicit idea that we have somehow reached an endpoint in nationhood, and the current setup is the 'real' one. On top of this, the inherent principle is that all current nations can be traced back to all previous iterations in a simple line of heredity.

The Elgin Marbles, despite regularly being used as the prime example of the crime, were not looted. Lord Elgin got permission from the local authorities to take them. They are therefore more rightfully the possessions of the British Museum than most of the Greek coins in everyone's collections. The problem with the Elgin Marbles, however, is that the 'nation' that gave permission was the Ottoman Empire. It can be argued that the Ottoman Empire probably didn't have the cutural interests of the future Greek state in mind, but they were the relevant authority at the time. If we weren't at the 'real' endpoint of nations then, why are we now?

It might be, sometime in the future, that the nation of Greece ceases to exist once more. After all, one of the arguments in favour of Brexit was that the EU is pushing for 'ever closer union' (as described in several treaties since the Treaty of Rome in 1957). One logical conclusion is that all the states within the EU will cease to exist, to be replaced by the EU nation. Greece has signed up to this many times. Greece, therefore, will be the same nation as France and Germany. Surely, France and Germany can keep hold of their Greek artefacts in anticipation of the fact.

The Benin bronzes were returned to Nigeria, with everyone expecting that to mean the 'nation' of Nigeria, only for the Nigerians to give them to the royal family. Given the bronzes adorned the palace of the Kingdom of Benin, their royal family clearly has more right to the bronzes than the Nigerian state. Yet everyone seems to be uncomfortable with that, as it means one privileged family gets to keep them all instead of the wider (and more socialist) cultural entity of 'the people of the Benin bronzes' (whoever they are). This brings forth the moral quandry that really we should give all our artefacts back not to any state, but to the wealthy families who owned them the first time, and who did plenty of suppressing, colonialising, killing, robbing and looting of their own.

Of course, if we do that, and even if we don't, a vast number of these artefacts will end up on the art market. Royal families eventually disperse and their descendants sell off the heirlooms. Museums can't afford to store every last bit of pottery, so they sell them, keeping an ever-smaller set of examples as history grows. What it comes down to is not culture, but money, and there are lots of reasons to distrust anyone looking for that.

It would have made better sense if I'd mentioned this in the first place, but I personally don't believe that repratriation has to be predicated on the notion that current political polities have to represent any kind of permanent, implicitly arbitrary 'endpoint in nationhood.'  They're merely where we are at this, subsequent, post-colonial moment of history.  That's the premise of international treaties; it works fine for me in this context as well.

[Hrefn]

It is safer for the cultural patrimony of the human race to be distributed.  To localize it is to allow the possibility of losing it all at a stroke. Human governments frequently fall under the control of rapacious thieves or iconoclastic purifiers who see the treasures of the past as either potential ready cash, or disdained relicts of a time of ignorance and impiety.  The latter are the more dangerous as they bring enthusiasm to the destruction.  The thieves at least try to preserve the artifacts until they can get paid.   

In the past century, the museums in every European country have been looted, excepting the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Sweden.  Correct me if I am wrong.  Nation states are ephemeral, political regimes are mutable, attitudes toward the importance of cultural artifacts are not always congruent with present opinions in enlightened European or American circles.  Au contraire, Enlightenment France was one of the preeminent wreckers of its own patrimony, and an enthusiastic looter of others’ on a grand scale.  

There are a few examples of governments and museums being honest and responsible custodians of the past, but through avarice, fanaticism, revolution, conquest, or carelessness they frequently are not.  

I have already written about the difficulty determining to whom one returns an artifact after deciding it should be returned.   But at the risk of causing offense I feel obliged to say that much of the impetus for “repatriating” cultural property is virtue signaling, however well intentioned.  I see no groundswell of opinion that anything larger than a breadbox be “returned.”  (The Elgin marbles being an exception.) When will the Turks return Smyrna to Greece?  Or should Turkey regain the European territories it lost  in the nineteenth century?  If not, why are we returning items of comparatively trivial value?   How many readers are residing on stolen/conquered land?  And how many of you have voluntarily ceded your rights back to the original owners?  If you are unwilling to give up your house, why should I give up my drachma, my bronze pot, my cultural artifact?  Is it morally right to keep conquered real estate, but morally wrong to keep ancient pocket change?  
When Westminster Abbey is returned to the Catholics, or the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes, or the Romans, or the Celts who probably had a Sacred Grove there before the Romans chopped it down, only then will I believe that people who call for the return of stuff are TRULY serious.  If we plan only to return the little stuff, but not the big stuff, or the geographic stuff, then I must gently point out that the moral principle which is being appealed to is quite inchoate.

Here are a couple of coins minted in Carthage.  Do you want to know whose cultural patrimony they are?  They are not Tunisia’s, Greece’s, Rome’s, or the Museum of Berber History’s.  A case could be made for any of them, but that each of these entities could make an equally plausible but mutually exclusive case invalidates them all.  The truth is that these coins are MY cultural patrimony.  I have studied them. I went to great lengths to procure them.  I have shared them with my children, and I hope one day to pass them on to them.  I also purchased them with money I worked to earn, which is not a trivial point when questions of ownership arise.

if they were coined in Naxos, would the situation be different?   I do not think so.  
 

 

Edited May 17, 2023 by Hrefn
Remove empty space

[Al Kowsky]

1 hour ago, Hrefn said:

It is safer for the cultural patrimony of the human race to be distributed.  To localize it is to allow the possibility of losing it all at a stroke. Human governments frequently fall under the control of rapacious thieves or iconoclastic purifiers who see the treasures of the past as either potential ready cash, or disdained relicts of a time of ignorance and impiety.  The latter are the more dangerous as they bring enthusiasm to the destruction.  The thieves at least try to preserve the artifacts until they can get paid.   

In the past century, the museums in every European country have been looted, excepting the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Sweden.  Correct me if I am wrong.  Nation states are ephemeral, political regimes are mutable, attitudes toward the importance of cultural artifacts are not always congruent with present opinions in enlightened European or American circles.  Au contraire, Enlightenment France was one of the preeminent wreckers of its own patrimony, and an enthusiastic looter of others’ on a grand scale.  

There are a few examples of governments and museums being honest and responsible custodians of the past, but through avarice, fanaticism, revolution, conquest, or carelessness they frequently are not.  

I have already written about the difficulty determining to whom one returns an artifact after deciding it should be returned.   But at the risk of causing offense I feel obliged to say that much of the impetus for “repatriating” cultural property is virtue signaling, however well intentioned.  I see no groundswell of opinion that anything larger than a breadbox be “returned.”  (The Elgin marbles being an exception.) When will the Turks return Smyrna to Greece?  Or should Turkey regain the European territories it lost  in the nineteenth century?  If not, why are we returning items of comparatively trivial value?   How many readers are residing on stolen/conquered land?  And how many of you have voluntarily ceded your rights back to the original owners?  If you are unwilling to give up your house, why should I give up my drachma, my bronze pot, my cultural artifact?  Is it morally right to keep conquered real estate, but morally wrong to keep ancient pocket change?  
When Westminster Abbey is returned to the Catholics, or the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes, or the Romans, or the Celts who probably had a Sacred Grove there before the Romans chopped it down, only then will I believe that people who call for the return of stuff are TRULY serious.  If we plan only to return the little stuff, but not the big stuff, or the geographic stuff, then I must gently point out that the moral principle which is being appealed to is quite inchoate.

Here are a couple of coins minted in Carthage.  Do you want to know whose cultural patrimony they are?  They are not Tunisia’s, Greece’s, Rome’s, or the Museum of Berber History’s.  A case could be made for any of them, but that each of these entities could make an equally plausible but mutually exclusive case invalidates them all.  The truth is that these coins are MY cultural patrimony.  I have studied them. I went to great lengths to procure them.  I have shared them with my children, and I hope one day to pass them on to them.  I also purchased them with money I worked to earn, which is not a trivial point when questions of ownership arise.

if they were coined in Naxos, would the situation be different?   I do not think so.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those are two handsome solidi, & I'm sure you don't toss & turn in your sleep wondering who these coins really belong to 😂. Your comments illustrate well the dichotomy of rightful possession 😉. Most of us want to do the right thing, however, determining what the right thing is can be a real challenge 🤔.

[CPK]

4 hours ago, Hrefn said:

It is safer for the cultural patrimony of the human race to be distributed.  To localize it is to allow the possibility of losing it all at a stroke. Human governments frequently fall under the control of rapacious thieves or iconoclastic purifiers who see the treasures of the past as either potential ready cash, or disdained relicts of a time of ignorance and impiety.  The latter are the more dangerous as they bring enthusiasm to the destruction.  The thieves at least try to preserve the artifacts until they can get paid.   

In the past century, the museums in every European country have been looted, excepting the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Sweden.  Correct me if I am wrong.  Nation states are ephemeral, political regimes are mutable, attitudes toward the importance of cultural artifacts are not always congruent with present opinions in enlightened European or American circles.  Au contraire, Enlightenment France was one of the preeminent wreckers of its own patrimony, and an enthusiastic looter of others’ on a grand scale.  

There are a few examples of governments and museums being honest and responsible custodians of the past, but through avarice, fanaticism, revolution, conquest, or carelessness they frequently are not.  

I have already written about the difficulty determining to whom one returns an artifact after deciding it should be returned.   But at the risk of causing offense I feel obliged to say that much of the impetus for “repatriating” cultural property is virtue signaling, however well intentioned.  I see no groundswell of opinion that anything larger than a breadbox be “returned.”  (The Elgin marbles being an exception.) When will the Turks return Smyrna to Greece?  Or should Turkey regain the European territories it lost  in the nineteenth century?  If not, why are we returning items of comparatively trivial value?   How many readers are residing on stolen/conquered land?  And how many of you have voluntarily ceded your rights back to the original owners?  If you are unwilling to give up your house, why should I give up my drachma, my bronze pot, my cultural artifact?  Is it morally right to keep conquered real estate, but morally wrong to keep ancient pocket change?  
When Westminster Abbey is returned to the Catholics, or the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes, or the Romans, or the Celts who probably had a Sacred Grove there before the Romans chopped it down, only then will I believe that people who call for the return of stuff are TRULY serious.  If we plan only to return the little stuff, but not the big stuff, or the geographic stuff, then I must gently point out that the moral principle which is being appealed to is quite inchoate.

Here are a couple of coins minted in Carthage.  Do you want to know whose cultural patrimony they are?  They are not Tunisia’s, Greece’s, Rome’s, or the Museum of Berber History’s.  A case could be made for any of them, but that each of these entities could make an equally plausible but mutually exclusive case invalidates them all.  The truth is that these coins are MY cultural patrimony.  I have studied them. I went to great lengths to procure them.  I have shared them with my children, and I hope one day to pass them on to them.  I also purchased them with money I worked to earn, which is not a trivial point when questions of ownership arise.

if they were coined in Naxos, would the situation be different?   I do not think so.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rem acu tetigisti!

 

[Deinomenid]

"Oddly" the worst case scenario as described in these podcasts  has already come to pass re the Benin Bronzes, and strangely (ha!) isn't  highlighted quite as much in the press. The Nigerian federal government (a generous term for a kleptocracy) has announced that  returned bronzes will now go to the Oba.

The Oba (for those that didn't follow the podcasts) is an interesting sort, whose family were well-known for  large scale slave trading (and until not that long ago close to  industrial scale human sacrifice, if anyone wants to quibble) and whose current reputation could be described as somewhat unsaintly. 

Anyway, he he gets them. Cue  the sounds  of backpedaling from Berlin, Oxford and Cambridge etc. They were naive fools  to suspect  otherwise of course  but there we go.

 

The University of Cambridge's excellent Prof Tombs is leading the rearguard action here.

 

Excerpt from History Reclaimed today -

Lo and behold, last week the Nigerian government announced that it was transferring ownership of all the Bronzes in the world to the present Oba of Benin, the descendant of slave-trading and human-sacrificing Obas from whom the British took them in 1897. In the United States, the descendants of slaves traded by the Obas have always vehemently opposed such a move. The German government which was preparing to return hundreds of its Benin Bronzes, various British museums, and a host of cultural commentators are now reaching for reverse gear. The University of Cambridge was within days of returning its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments; the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has been planning to do the same. Both universities have now put their plans on hold.
 
The editors of History Reclaimed have written to both Vice-Chancellors to insist that in a situation of uncertainty, where legal ownership has suddenly changed, and where there is such opposition from African-Americans to the decision of the Nigerian government, the first principle of ‘restitution’ – that the objects to be returned are guaranteed to be safe and properly conserved – cannot be met and the Benin Bronzes should stay exactly where they are. Both universities have acknowledged our representations and Professor Robert Tombs is pursuing freedom of information requests from Cambridge. The Benin Bronzes are a test case of ‘restitution’: the argument for their return to Nigeria was apparently unanswerable and they were supposed to be the first of many ‘returns’ from British museums. It looks as if this particular horse has fallen at the first hurdle, or so we must hope. We shall follow this chase with great interest and will not hesitate to represent the views of those who have always warned against ‘restitution’.

[thenickelguy]

Ignorance is bliss. I never thought too much about who owns what while it resides in a museum. I have been to several and was amazed of course. As for that video, I actually watched the whole thing. (even muted the TV while doing so)

Made me think of the ugly greed in this world. Always been that way, and always will until the end. Lucky, I've possessed way too much stuff in my little existence to keep me entertained for a lifetime. I actually feel a little guilty with the things I've accumulated. It isn't all that easy to get rid of either, short of giving it away. LOL!

Obviously there are people that never stop to ponder the possibility that they just might not be able to take it with them when they go. They want it ALL! This makes me grateful I won't have to either. What a hassle that would be. Odd how people equate having vast riches with immortality. 

Ha! I just got this picture in my head of a hearse being followed by a long line of moving vans on the way to the cemetery.

Edited September 8, 2023 by thenickelguy