Blake Gopnik has
the tale of two museums and their artifacts of dubious origin. The University of Pennsylvania has announced that they are returning to Turkey the Bronze Age jewelry known as "Trojan Gold" (above), which evidence suggests was dug up somewhere near Troy.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland Museum of Art has announced that they are holding on to a head of Drusus, son of the Roman emperor Tiberius, even though its past cannot be documented well enough to meet current conventions. They justified their purchase partly by pointing out that if they had not acquired the head, some private collector would, and they have the resources to take care of it properly. Besides:
There’s another downside to repatriations like the one Penn has announced. They play into the notion that the countries in today’s U.N. have a unique claim to every object ever made within their modern borders, as part of their trademark “cultural heritage.” Franklin points out that with his head of Drusus, “you have an object where the marble seems to be Turkish and the artist was probably Roman, working in Algeria ... The whole concept of ownership by a country goes against the way art was made.” Does the Drusus head really belong to Turkey, where it was born and the Roman empire ended its days, or to Algeria, where Drusus would have been worshipped, or maybe even to the Italians of modern Rome? Or maybe it belongs just as much to some little girl in Cleveland, who has read about the Romans from the time of Christ, and wants to see what one of them looked like and what kind of artworks they would have treasured. Franklin points out that, uniquely in a museum like his, she can compare that marble head to a long history of Christian art that either rejected a Roman model or tried to match it.
I agree absolutely.
I disagree. I thought Gopnik's article was weakly conceived and poorly researched. He didn't even make a desultory attempt to raise any of the many rebuttals to the Cuno position Franklin is parroting.
ReplyDeleteAttempts at repatriation are not grounded in facile nationalism that can be swatted away with "well you didn't own it first anyway." There are laws against the illicit excavation, export and sale of cultural patrimony. In most source countries, these laws have been on the books for decades, even centuries, in some cases. The Papal States had them in the Renaissance, and Italy has had them since the first decade of the 20th century.
Thus, when museums look the other way or play at due diligence without making a full and true investigation into the ownership history of potential purchases, which Cleveland is at least skirting the edge of in the Drusus case, they could very well be receiving stolen property. It's against the laws of the countries of origin, and it's against the laws of these United States. To use Franklin's analogy, that little girl might be inspired and educated by watching I Claudius on a beautiful 60-inch plasma screen Dad picked up for cheap when it fell off the back of a truck, but that doesn't mean Daddy was right to ask no questions, pay in cash and just hope there's no knock on the door.
Furthermore, the damage done to archaeological sites by looters is inestimable. I'm sure as an archaeologist you've seen more than you would have wanted to yourself, but the tombaroli in Italy don't just strip sites clean, they often destroy them deliberately to cover their tracks. That's what happened to the Cervetri tomb where the Sarpedon Krater was stolen from, and Met director Thomas Hoving knew full well that masterpiece was recently and illegally excavated when he purchased it. He bragged about it in a 2001 article called "The Hot Pot." It's nothing short of nauseating for someone who is supposed to be dedicated to the conservation of cultural patrimony to so callously disregard the destruction left in the filthy swath of acquisition.
Lastly, and this is particularly relevant today, the smuggling of antiquities is the third most profitable business for organized crime after the smuggling of narcotics and weapons. These people are violent, ruthless and leave literal craters where archaeological remains used to be. They use backhoes and dynamite to clear sites. It's not just cliche mafiosi we're talking about, but terrorist networks as well. Mohammed Atta tried to sell Afghani antiquities in Germany to finance the purchase of an airplane during his planning of 9/11. That is a fact, not a Bushian scare tactic.
Just because an artifact has been laundered through Switzerland and/or a couple of major auction houses, and has had a flimsy "private collection" provenance ginned up with a some old letterhead and a typewriter (again, this is a fact; the Becchinas admitted in court to doing this all the time) does not put the museum buying the object in the clear. The trade in antiquities is a dirty, bloody business and no abstract theories of aesthetics, global ownership of history, the value of the encyclopedic museum or gauzy appeal to little girls with dreams can justify the buyers pretending that they are not fully complicit in the damage it has caused and continues to cause to cultural heritage, archaeology and human life.
I assert again that the Italian government simply has no right to claim ownership of all archaeological objects found within its borders. These laws have created all sorts of mockeries, like handing over a very important early synagogue to the government of Syria, which locked it in a basement.
ReplyDeleteThat the trade in global antiquities is illegal means nothing to me one way or the other. The world is full of bad laws. Many of them are very old. (Besides banning the export of antiquities, the Papal States used to have the death penalty for atheism.) Many laws make the situation worse; for example, most laws against drugs.
What if, instead of banning the export of antiquities, the Italian government allowed excavators who meet certain professional standards to keep what they find and sell it? The state could impose a heavy export tax to finance the necessary archaeological inspectors, and it could have the sort of rule Britain has for "treasure trove," that is, it could allow the state to buy all artifacts at a court-set price if the state so desired.
The situation now is that workmen who stumble across an Etruscan cemetery now get nothing, and in fact would probably lose their jobs if they reported the find to the authorities, causing the project to be shut down. So of course they hide the stuff and try to sell it.
I think the destruction wrought by grave robbers is caused by antiquities as much as it is prevented by it.