Quote: Most of the world’s great museums, including the British
Museum and the Louvre, tell lies of omission about the objects they
display within their walls, too.Some excerpts from The New York Times
article on the Metropolitan museum. The above quote is also from the
same source. Full piece is available
athttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/opinion/01waxman.html?pagewanted=1&_
r=2&th&emc=th
Sampath
Museum exhibits – stolen artifacts?
Who should own the treasures of antiquity?
The debate about the ownership of artifacts in museums continue. Very
rarely do the museums give the history of the acquisition of pieces. The
issue is that by buying stolen objects, they encourage the looting of
cultural heritage.
The governments of Italy and Turkey have filed lawsuits to force the
return of plundered and looted artworks. Egypt has threatened to suspend
excavation permits if iconic artifacts are not repatriated. Greece has
built a new museum in Athens in large part to justify its renewed
demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles from Britain.
For the most part, the world’s great museums, like the Metropolitan,
have responded only when under direct threat and, even then, they do not
acknowledge wrongdoing.
A stunningly beautiful vase by one of the greatest artists of ancient
Greece, it came to the Met under dubious circumstances in 1972
court records say it had been excavated by a gang of tomb robbers in
Italy. After a long, embarrassing fight, the museum sent the krater back
to Italy last January, which then displayed it as part of an exhibition
called “Nostoi,” a nod to the ancient Greek epic about the
heroes’ return from the Trojan war.
The Met’s galleries and Web site are mysteriously devoid of recent
facts about the provenance of many artifacts. Most visitors have no idea
how the treasures on display in the Greek and Roman rooms, the Egyptian
antiquities department, or the Byzantine, African, Asian and Oceanic
collections came to be housed in the museum.
As the American consul in Cyprus in the 1860s, Cesnola kept 100 diggers
busy in Larnaca; his house became a kind of museum. Cesnola smuggled out
no fewer than 35,573 artifacts passing them off as the property of
the Russian consul for which the Met paid $60,000.
How did it get here? In 1922, as the Greeks and Turks warred over the
port of Izmir, the column was spirited away by American archaeologists
along with hundreds of other pieces and sent to the Met. When the
hostilities ended, the Turks protested and the theft (or rescue,
depending on one’s perspective) became an international incident,
recorded in State Department archives. After much negotiation, the Turks
ceded ownership of the column in exchange for the return of 53 cases of
antiquities, also stolen from Sardis.
For years, the Met also kept secret its purchase of the Lydian Hoard, a
spectacular group of 363 gold and silver treasures from the time of King
Croesus, bought from smugglers in 1966, 1967 and 1968. It was not until
the Turkish government sued the museum and seemed likely to win in court
that the Met gave in and returned the pieces, in 1993.
Most of the world’s great museums, including the British Museum and
the Louvre, tell lies of omission about the objects they display within
their walls, too.
