Tue, Jul 07, 2015 page9

• Preserving world cultures creates ethical dilemmas

  Western ‘universal’ museums’ quests to acquire and display artifacts from other nations and cultures sometimes stokes the illegal arts trade and reproduces colonialist narratives

  • By Kanishk Tharoor / The Guardian
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  Every month produces new cases of the “repatriation” of antiquities from US museums to their countries of origin.

  In late May, Italian authorities displayed 25 looted artifacts retrieved from the US. They included some objects smuggled by the infamous dealer Giacomo Medici, convicted in 2004 for selling thousands of stolen pieces of Greco-Roman art from Italy and the Mediterranean. A few weeks earlier, the Cleveland Museum of Art returned a 10th century statue of the Hindu god Hanuman to Cambodia. The statue had been hacked from the Prasat Chen temple in Siem Reap in the 1960s before journeying via a litany of dealers into the holds of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1982.

  In April, US Department of Homeland Security agents relieved the Honolulu Museum of Art of seven ancient Indian artifacts believed to have been acquired through Subhash Kapoor, a New York-based art dealer.

  

  Illustration: Yusha

  Kapoor, who currently languishes in police custody in India, presided over a vast criminal operation whose full scope authorities are still trying to understand. An ongoing investigation dubbed Operation Hidden Idol spans four continents in trying to untangle Kapoor’s network. For decades, he funneled stolen antiquities from India and Southeast Asia to private collectors and major museums in the West to the tune of more than US$100 million (and perhaps even more than that).

  Some of the big US institutions connected to Kapoor include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (the Met), the Art Institute in Chicago and the Asian Museum of Art in San Francisco.

  Operation Hidden Idol has piled further pressure on US museums to ensure that their collections are not home to illegally acquired artifacts. In the past 10 years, public collections, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Met have given up hundreds of tarnished objects. In acquiring these illicit antiquities, museums failed to do due diligence in determining the authenticity and provenance of objects. They have since lost millions of dollars.

  However, it is not just the financial pain that worries curators and museum bosses. The headlines generated by such scandals threaten the very acquisitive enterprise of western museums; mounting demands for repatriation make more difficult the project of building “universal” institutions presenting the art and history of the world.

  Sometimes, these claims have little to do with the illicit trade. Writing in the New York Times, Hugh Eakin decried the strong-arming tactics of “art-rich” countries like Turkey, Greece and Italy.

  “Museums’ relationships with foreign governments have become increasingly contingent upon giving in to unreasonable, and sometimes blatantly extortionary, demands,” he wrote.

  As China and India grow on the geopolitical stage, so too have their demands (often by private groups and individuals rather than governments) for the restitution of artifacts from the West.

  As a result, defenders of museums believe that their diverse and cosmopolitan collections are under attack from governments and groups with narrow, nationalist agendas.

  Critics of Western museums accuse them of complicity in the illicit trade and at a more general level, of perpetuating the gross inequalities between the West and the rest of the world.

  According to Jason Felch, author of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, the “museum culture in the US has been slow to sensitize to the realities of the illicit trade.”

  He sees a parallel between the trade in antiquities and the drug trade: demand in Western countries makes both possible.

  “As long as there’s a lucrative market for looted goods, for objects with uncertain provenance, there will be an illicit antiquities trade,” he said.

  Tess Davis, a lawyer with the Antiquities Coalition, praised the Cleveland Museum of Art for voluntarily returning the Hanuman statue, but said that it should never have been allowed to enter the collection in the first place.

  “The Hanuman first surfaced on the market while Cambodia was in the midst of a war and facing genocide,” she said. “How could anyone not know this was stolen property? The only answer is that no one wanted to know.”

  US museums are largely self-regulated, though many subscribe to the stricter guidelines adopted in 2008 by the American Association of Museum Directors governing the acquisition of archaeological material. Museums have rarely been forced by legal rulings to give up artifacts; instead, they have voluntarily — sometimes pre-emptively — handed over the dodgy objects in their collections.

  “No one wants to be promoting the illegal trade,” Getty Trust chief executive James Cuno said. “Collectors have to be very careful about both the authenticity of the object and the legality of a transaction.”

  However, Cuno fears that universal museums in the West face a deeper challenge from nationalists around the world. Governments and their deputized national museums often couch their demands for repatriation in terms of “repairing the integrity of the nation.”

  Cuno says that these claims are more theatrical than moral, making cultural property “about politics and the political agenda of ruling elites.”

  In his view, the universal museum remains the best context in which to engage with art.

  “Works of art have not adhered to modern political borders,” he said. “They have always sought connection elsewhere to strange and wonderful things.”

  The ongoing destruction of ancient sites in the Middle East by the Islamic State (IS) group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has galvanized the case for the universal museum, with advocates like the former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore Gary Vikan, arguing that only institutions in the West can preserve the world’s cultural heritage.

  IS’ cultural atrocities “will put an end to the excess piety in favor of the repatriation model,” he told the New York Times.

  From another perspective, that defense smacks of Western privilege.

  “Colonialism is alive and well in the art world,” Davis said. “So-called leaders in the field still justify retaining plunder in order to fill their ‘universal museums’ where patrons can view encyclopedic collections from all over the world. A noble idea, in theory, but in practice, a Western luxury. The citizens of New York, London and Paris may benefit, but those of Phnom Penh? Never.”

  Felch, who has spent years investigating the practices and acquisitions of institutions like the Getty Museum, understands the problematic history of universal museums in the West, but still sees great value in their encyclopedic character.

  “Many collections were built during colonial times, but I’m not tilting at windmills, trying to undo history,” he said. “I wish there were encyclopedic museums elsewhere in the world.”

  He suggests that the many large, well-resourced museums in the West must help facilitate loans and exchanges with museums in other parts of the world.

  While at odds with Felch on other counts, Cuno agrees that institutions like his have a global mission.

  “Any museum that argues for cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity has the obligation to encourage that access everywhere,” he said. “There is no reason to believe that people elsewhere are not curious about the world.”
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