Looting In the Interest of Culture or How A Colonial Legacy Persists

Matthew Bogdanos is not a household name by any means.  But it is to gallery owners, private art collectors and museum officials.  Bogdanos, who serves as the Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, has made it his mission to identify stolen or otherwise ill-gotten artifacts and return them to their lawful owners. 

An ex-marine, Bogdanos developed a personal disdain for the scourge of stolen art when he witnessed the looting of the Iraq Museum in the aftermath of the US invasion.  Thanks to his efforts, his team managed to recover approximately 10,000 pieces.  In his current job as a DA, Bogdanos has seized more than 4,000 artifacts and has repatriated hundreds of them to almost two dozen countries.  His legal successes have contributed to changing the attitudes and policies of art owners and museum officials.  As Bogdanos puts it, someone has “to guard the guardians (of art).”

Art that has fallen in the hands of private collectors or museums by illegal means in the black markets for artifacts is one part of the problem.  The other and more enduring and, I would say, more reprehensible part of the problem is art looted by national armies or removed by private citizens with the approval of state authorities and then brought and kept in the countries of the looters.

So, the object of this writing is not per se the commendable work of people like Matthew Bogdanos, but rather the arguments made by the apologists of the great museums of the West in holding on to looted art and their resistance against repatriating it to the countries of origin. 

Given my Greek roots, this topic is close to my heart, since, as all Greeks, I resent the refusal of the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon during the Ottoman times, to where they belong.  It was though an essay written by David Frum that appeared in The Atlantic last year that I found objectionable enough to put looted art in my list of candidate posts.  And yet, month after month I demurred about writing about it.  Until this past month, when I saw an article by Jason Felch in the NYT with the suggestive title “Museums Should Have Never Hoarded Looted Artifacts.”

What I learned in this article was that art deemed to be of universal value (universal by the aesthetic criteria of Western elites) ought to be housed in the great museums of the West as the heritage of the whole humankind regardless of where it was produced and by what people.  That was how the concept of the “universal” museum was supposed to gain legitimacy.  This concept was an intellectual product of the Enlightenment which espoused universal values.  Of course, the emergence of “universal” museums would not be possible without the imperial outreach of European powers, the subjugation of their colonies, and the massive relocation of artifacts to their own museums. 

David Frum, who centers his essay around the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria,* makes similar arguments as to who is a better custodian of great art; inadequately funded and poorly-managed museums in poor countries or well-funded and well-managed museums in the West.  And by the same logic, great art deserves the greatest possible accessibility that only museums in well-travelled Western countries can offer.  However, Jason Felch points out that of the more than 8 million artifacts owned by the British Museum only one percent is displayed.  So much for accessibility.  And this year it was disclosed that 2,000 objects had disappeared from the British Museum without any clue how this happened.  So much for custodianship.

Frum does admit that artifacts kept and exhibited in Western museums perpetuate memories of a painful history of subjugation.  And having to travel to Western museums to see samples of their cultural heritage is one more reminder to the people of former colonies that their bondage to their colonial masters is not been entirely over.    

But then Frum is willing to defend the notion of the “universal” museum through a series of spurious and even, what looted nations would consider, offensive arguments.  These arguments run something like this: it is only a minority of local elites in countries of origin that care about repatriation; the binding and inspirational power of art works better in Western societies; the Western museum is a great accomplishment of human civilization; the artistic work of any country is part of a common heritage of all humanity.

So, what we have here is in fact a defense of neo-colonialism carefully camouflaged as a thesis that supposedly serves a higher purpose.  By that I mean that although the political and military subjugation of former colonies is gone, forms of subordination and dependency by other means still persist, and one of them is holding on to looted art.  Shamelessly, the hoarding of such art is framed in arguments that allow Western countries to be both the judge and the jury.  In other words, they are the ones who decide what criteria museums and even government systems in former colonies ought to fulfill to have a legitimate claim for repatriation.  Former colonial powers, which were often rapacious in expropriating the resources of colonized and occupied countries, now they declare the cultural heritage of their colonial subjects the common heritage of humanity which moreover should be enjoyed only in their own (Western) museums.

If former colonial countries had any intention to undo some of the damage of their colonial rule, they should first return the fruits of their looting to their rightful owners.  And if the great Western museums cared about the conditions of maintenance and display of these artifacts, they should provide financial and managerial assistance to establish well-run museums in the countries where the looted artifacts first came out of the hands of the artists in those countries.

For years, officials of the British Museum argued that Greece had no world-class museum to house the Elgin Marbles.  Then in 2009, Greece opened the Acropolis Museum which quickly garnered multiple awards and global recognition.  Of course, by that time the arguments of the British Museum had again shifted.

It is high time Western countries stopped hiding behind the self-serving construct of the “universal” museum and do the honorable thing and return looted art where it belongs. 

*Benin was an ancient kingdom in southern Nigeria.  The Benin Bronzes (though not made of bronze) are artifacts of exquisite artistry that belonged to the kings of Benin.