The New York Times
05/09/10
Béatrice de Géa
Egypt has asked for the return of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum
in Berlin.
Greece wants the New Acropolis Museum with images of Caryatids on the walls,
to be the home of the Elgin marbles.
It was gridlock in the British Museum the other morning as South African
teenagers, Japanese businessmen toting Harrods bags, and a busload of German
tourists - the usual crane-necked, camera-flashing babel of visitors -
formed scrums before the Rosetta Stone, which Egyptian authorities just
lately have again demanded that Britain return to Egypt. From the Egyptian
rooms the crowds shuffled past the Assyrian gates from Balawat (Iraq is
another country pleading for lost antiquities) and past the Roman statue of
the crouching Aphrodite (ditto Italy), then headed toward the galleries
containing what are known in Britain as the Elgin marbles (but in Greece as
the Parthenon marbles, or simply booty), where passers-by plucked pamphlets
from a rack.
The British Museum is Europe's Western front in the global war over cultural
patrimony, on account of the marbles. The pamphlets give the museum's
version for why they should stay in Britain, as they have for two
centuries - ever since Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Sublime
Porte at Constantinople, and with the consent of the ruling Ottomans (not to
mention a blithe disregard for whatever may have been the wishes of the
Greek populace), spirited them from the Acropolis in Athens. The pamphlet
stresses that the British Museum is free and attracts millions of visitors
every year from around the world, making the sculptures available to, and
putting them in the context of, a wide swath of human civilization.
For their part the Greeks, before their economy collapsed, finally opened
the long-delayed New Acropolis Museum last year to much fanfare: it's an
up-to-date facility, forbidding and frankly ugly outside, but airy and
light-filled inside, a home-in-waiting for the marbles, whose absence is
clearly advertised by bone-white plaster casts of what Elgin took, alongside
yellowed originals that he left behind. The view through a broad picture
window, eloquent but baleful under the circumstances, looks onto the ruined
Parthenon, playing on visitors' heartstrings. Greeks deem the museum a
slam-dunk argument for the marbles' return.
It's definitely compelling.
But the British still make the better case.
Siding with the imperialists drives good people bonkers, I know. It's akin
to Yankees worship, with the Greeks playing the underdog role of the old Red
Sox. That said, patrimony claims too often serve merely nationalist ends
these days, no less often than they do decent ones, never mind that the
archaeological and legal arguments by the Greeks, while elaborately reasoned
and passionately felt, don't finally trump the British ones.
Mostly, though, the issue comes down to the fact that culture, while it can
have deeply rooted, special meanings to specific people, doesn't belong to
anyone in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't stand still. When Walter
Benjamin wrote in the last century about the original or authentic work of
art losing its aura, he was in part suggesting that the past is not
something we can just return to whenever we like - it's not something fixed
and always available. It's something forever beyond our grasp, which we must
reinvent to make present.
Today's Acropolis is itself a kind of fiction. Over the centuries and
through succeeding empires and regimes, it became Christian and Turkish, and
briefly Venetian, after it had been Roman. The Parthenon was a pagan temple,
a church, a mosque, an arms depot (disastrously, under the Turks) and even a
place from which the Nazis hung a big swastika flag whose removal by Greek
patriots helped spur a resistance movement. Modernity has mostly stripped
the site of all those layers of history to recover a Periclean-era past that
represents, because it has come to mean the most to us, its supposed true
self - a process of archeological excavation, based on another modern kind
of fiction about historical and scientific objectivity that inevitably adds
its own layer of history.
One of the paradoxes of the marbles debate is that it was precisely their
removal to London, and all the anguish and furor and archaeological interest
and study this provoked, starting with Hellenophiles like Lord Byron heaping
scorn on Elgin and fellow Britons, that helped galvanize the Greeks' own
sense of national identity and their pride in the Parthenon sculptures. Now
the Greek government has even chosen to name its consolidation plan to
combat the economic collapse after an architect of the Parthenon,
Kallikrates.
But the general question, looting and tourist dollars aside, is why should
any objects necessarily reside in the modern nation-state controlling the
plot of land where, at one time, perhaps thousands of years earlier, they
came from? The question goes to the heart of how culture operates in a
global age.
The Greek proposal that Britain fork over Elgin's treasures has never
involved actually putting the sculptures back onto the Parthenon, which
started crumbling long before he showed up. The marbles would go from one
museum into another, albeit one much closer. The Greeks argue for proximity,
not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly
about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is
more nationalistic and symbolic.
Over the centuries, meanwhile, bits and pieces of the Parthenon have ended
up in six different countries, in the way that countless altars and other
works of art have been split up and dispersed among private collectors and
museums here and there. To the Greeks the Parthenon marbles may be a
singular cause, but they're like plenty of other works that have been broken
up and disseminated. The effect of this vandalism on the education and
enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered
works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.
That's not an excuse for looting. It's simply to recognize that art,
differently presented, abridged, whatever, can speak in myriad contexts. It's
resilient and spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders. Ripped from its
origins, it loses one set of meanings, to gain others.
Laws today fortunately prevent pillaging sites like the Acropolis. But they
stop short of demanding that every chopped-up altar by Rubens, Fra Angelico
or whomever now be pieced together and returned to the churches and families
and institutions for which they were first intended. For better and worse,
history moves on.
The Elgin marbles, from the cultural crossroads of imperial London, reshaped
cultural history over the course of the last 200 years by giving rise to
neo-Classicism around the globe. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that
the Parthenon marbles, by virtue of their presence both in Athens and
London, helped spread that movement along with sympathy for the Greeks'
cause.
Americans, excepting Indians, may find this whole issue hard to grasp. We
don't tend to think in terms of American cultural patrimony, save perhaps
for the Liberty Bell or the Brooklyn Bridge, because we're an immigrant
nation worshipful of the free market. Demanding the return of American art
and artifacts to America sounds, well, un-American, not to mention bad for
the bottom line. We are too diverse in our roots, too focused on the
present, too historically amnesiac and individualistic (not to mention rich)
to worry overly about a collective culture or who might own it.
And in the end patrimony is about ownership, often of objects that as in the
marbles' case, come from bygone civilizations. What, in this context, does
it really mean to own culture?
Italy recently celebrated the return of a national treasure after the
Metropolitan Museum gave back a sixth-century B.C. Greek krater by the
painter Euphronius that tomb robbers dug up outside Rome during the 1970s.
Stolen property is stolen property. But how curious that an ancient Greek
vase, which centuries after it was made came into the possession of an
Etruscan collector (a kind of ancient Elgin) living on what is now the
outskirts of Rome, and then ended up buried for thousands of years below
what became modern Italy, is today Italian cultural patrimony. By that
definition, Elgin's loot is arguably British patrimony.
It's not coincidental that conflicts over patrimony have accelerated in
recent decades thanks to globalizing trends: the increasing circulation of
information along with objects and money - consequences of the Web, jet
travel and mass tourism - and the evolution of institutions like the British
Museum from sleepy, scholarly repositories of artifacts into entertainment
palaces and virtual town squares. Authorities in countries like Greece,
having seen the escalating economic and symbolic value of works like the
marbles, have naturally sought to take advantage.
It isn't to belittle a deep-seated connection to such works to point out
that claimants to far-flung patrimony may have various motives. When Zahi
Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, who made the recent fuss about the
Rosetta Stone, also demanded that Germany hand over Nerfertiti, the
3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten's wife, he chose the moment when the Neues
Museum in Berlin opened with the bust as its main attraction.
This was just after Farouk Hosny, Egypt's candidate to run Unesco, the
United Nations cultural agency, was defeated in a vote that Egyptian leaders
considered a diplomatic slap. Mr. Hawass used Egypt's only real weapon on
the international stage, its cultural patrimony, to lash out by proxy at the
perceived enemies of Mr. Hosny's candidacy and pander to the wounded egos of
Egypt's ruling elite.
It was a public relations gambit. Practically speaking, Egypt had to know
there was no immediate shot at getting Nerfertiti back. The sculpture served
in a passing form of political theater common these days, with Egypt playing
plucky David to the West's Goliath.
Patrimony debates often end up in this moral fog of shifting geopolitics.
The world was outraged when the National Museum in Iraq was looted after the
war there started. But almost nobody (outside Germany, anyway) cares today
whether Russia returns storerooms of treasures it stole at the end of World
War II. Nigeria holds the moral high ground in demanding the return of
sculptures burgled from that country's beleaguered museums, even though
insiders were often complicit in the crimes.
And after the Taliban destroyed a Buddhist temple and burned centuries-old
illuminated manuscripts, hardly anybody outside the country blinked when
Unesco refused to authorize shipments of artifacts from Afghanistan to
Switzerland because the move violated international rules against the
removal of "national patrimony" - and also because nobody was really paying
much attention to that region yet.
Then Taliban inspectors pulverized priceless treasures before the eyes of
helpless Afghan curators and blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in obedience to
Mullah Omar's edict against the existence of pre-Islamic art. Only then did
people in the West wake up and Unesco reconsider its position. Too late.
In the Parthenon's case the Greek actress Melina Mercouri kicked off the
modern repatriation push during the 1980s as part of the nationalist program
of a Greek leader, Andreas Papandreou, whose slogan was "Greece for the
Greeks." What started in conjunction with a political campaign then evolved
into a genuine street movement. Dimitris Pandermalis, the New Acropolis
Museum's director, told me before the museum opened last year that the Elgin
marbles' return "unifies us," meaning the Greek people, although surveys
show that few of them actually bother to visit the Acropolis after grade
school, while antique sites rivaling the Parthenon in archaeological
significance often go neglected across Greece. As I said, it's ultimately
about nationalism and symbolism.
So be it. That's why Greek authorities always decline diplomatic solutions
like sharing the marbles or asking for their loan. They assume any loan
request would legitimize Britain's ownership. The principle is high minded.
What results is, in effect, nothing, which doesn't diminish the Greeks'
connection with the missing marbles.
But as the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has cautioned about
the whole patrimony question: "We should remind ourselves of other
connections. One connection - the one neglected in talk of cultural
patrimony - is the connection not through identity but despite difference."
What he means is that people make connections across cultures through
objects like the marbles. These objects can become handmaidens for
ideologues, instruments for social division and tools of the economy, or
cicerones through history and oracles to a more perfect union of nations.
Art is something made in a particular place by particular people, and may
serve a particular function at one time but obtain different meanings at
other times. It summons distinct feelings to those for whom it's local, but
ultimately belongs to everyone and to no one.
We're all custodians of global culture for posterity.
Neither today's Greeks nor Britons own the Parthenon marbles, really.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2010, on page AR1 of
the New York edition.