An intellectual triumph or imperial plunder?
According to Ben Macintyre of The Times, it’s pointless trying to work out who owns ancient art objects.
His solution is to leave the best cultural legacy the world has produced in a first world “universal” museum where these objects are best displayed and preserved. Of course, that museum would be the British Museum, whose vast collection of “treasures” is “a great cornucopia of different civilisations, an encyclopaedic storehouse of universal knowledge, displaying the great cultures side by side, with equal veneration, to enlighten not just an elite, but the world.”
Only one line of text implies how these artifacts ended up in this place, “whether as trade goods or booty”. One wonders how Macintyre categorizes the negotiations between British Lord Elgin and the Turkish occupiers of Greece, who let him deface the Parthenon of the superb statues that now bear his name.
A “universal” museum does not lay a claim of ownership of the past. It merely “shares” a world heritage. But if these objects happen to be displayed in their countries of origin, say the Egyptian Museum, then that collection becomes “cultural property” a “restricted, homogenous museum culture describing not a world of ideas without borders, but a limited story defined by nationalism and politics.”
In a few words, claiming for the return of what you own is a nationalistic act with a political agenda. Keeping ancient art objects in a “universal” museum, is a civilized act of white Enlightenment, not imperial plunder.
Read Ben Macintyre’s article and some very enlightening comments by readers here.
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