No idea what Australian institutional racism has to do with Elgin Marbles.
Please drop this sidebar. I’m about ready to close this nearly 20 year old thread as more trouble than it is worth.
It seems the only arguments advanced here in defence of keeping the Marbles are Whatabout and the slippery-slope fallacy.
At least when Last Week Tonight covered this recently they talked about the actual non-fallacious defences e.g. “We take better care of them”, refuting them one by one.
No. Many of us pointed out the the Marbles were acquired legally. They were not stolen or looted. Based on that, instead of giving excuses as to why they should not be given to Greece, we need reasons as to why they should be given at all. Yes, the ancient City State of Athens made them. But then they were sold by what was at the time the recognized government of that area.
It occurs to me that there is already a large category of museum exhibits that are mostly replicas. Natural history museums across the globe have dinosaur skeletons, or other ancient fossils, on display, and millions of visitors ooh and aah over them. But if you read the informational plaques, usually only a very small percentage of what’s on display is the original fossils: Most of it is reconstructions (made without even the benefit of reference to the actual originals). Sometimes, especially for touring exhibits, the entire display piece will be a replica.
I think we need to ask ourselves precisely what the value is in an original piece, versus a faithful reproduction. Clearly, the ooh-and-aah factor is there, at least in large measure, for either. What other values are there, for which the originals are superior? I think we need to answer that before we can even begin to consider the question of where the originals should be.
I think that’s largely personal, but for me there’s relatively little recreational value in viewing a replica. The “ooh and ahh” factor is largely about seeing a piece of history. Your fossil comment is appropriate - I was very excited to visit the Field Museum during a trip to Chicago because that’s where Sue ‘lives.’
I’m not going to go out of my way to visit a museum with a bunch of prints of famous paintings. I could do that on my computer.
Part of it is feeling a connection with what you’re looking at, especially with very old pieces. I’m also sure part of it is the same monkey brain that places value on gold and limited edition trading cards, but there you go.
When I looked at the Book of Kells in Trinity College library, it was close to a spiritual experience.
This seems a little strange though. The Metropolitan Museum of Art as an example is curated and organized in a way for a Museum visit is worth far more than just looking at items on a computer. I don’t think it really matters all that much if a suit of armor is original or accurate replica. The dinosaur bones in The American Museum of Natural History sure has hell don’t need to be original for me to learn from them and to elicit a life long interest in dinosaurs and paleontology.
When I was a graduate student in public history more than a decade ago, this topic did come up. We had a rather interesting class discussion about the 28th Virginia infantry battle flag. The flag was captured by the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at the battle of Gettysburg and exhibited at the Minnesota state capitol until finally ending up at the Minnesota Historical Society in the 1890s. As of today, the 28th Virginia battle flag remains in Minnesota despite the state of Virginia asking for its return multiple times. Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota probably best summed up the answer to one such request by saying, “We took it. That makes it our heritage.”
Now you might be thinking, “To the victor go the spoils,” and I can’t help but agree. But there’s some dispute about who should have been in possession of the flag to begin with. Before the Civil War ended, the War Department ruled that any captured flag belonged to the United States and not any individual state. Legally speaking, I don’t know how much authority that really has, but there you go. At some point, the flag had been registered with War Department, but was either loaned to Minnesota or otherwise given to them before the 20th century. In 1905, Congress passed a resolution that all captured flags in their possession be returned to their respective states. But that only applied to flags held by the federal government and not individual states like Minnesota.
Virginians started campaigns to get the flag back in the 1960s, but no dice. It had been asserted that the flag belonged to the US War Department and not Minnesota, but Minnesota disagrees. In the 90s, Virginia argued that it had been stolen, but Minnesota said it was well beyond the six year statute of limitations on stolen goods. As recently as 2013, Virginia asked to borrow the flag and Minnesota refused the request.
In our class discussion, there were some very emotional participants who really wanted the flag returned to Virginia. But it’s a complicated issue both legally and morally. Okay, not so complicated morally for me on this issue. Spoils of war and all that.
Firstly, yes you have engaged in “whatabout” and “slippery slope” in this thread.
Your opening salvo rhetorically asked about giving America back to “the Indians” 
and you’ve given a pretty extensive list of whatabout artifacts.
Firstly historians dispute the veracity of that claim.
There is no record of it on the ottoman side and they did generally keep good records, and Elgin’s account is somewhat suspect.
Anyway I don’t claim to understand the history fully but I know that it’s definitely disputed.
Secondly this was considered a dubious argument for ownership even then. Plenty of senior figures at the time thought it was simple theft or vandalism, and it went as far as a debate in Parliament.
Good luck winning such a debate now. It would be akin to buying Ukrainian treasures from Russian controlled luhansk.
I’m not convinced that so-called “Whatabout” responses are nothing but the pointless fallacies that you’re trying to dismiss them as being.
AFAICT, repatriation of cultural property, and laws regarding same, are hugely influenced by consideration of precedents. We can roll our eyes at extreme slippery-slope hyperbole like “Returning this cultural artifact to its homeland will mean that all people of European descent have to leave North America!” and so on. But the serious question “What specific precedent(s) might this act of repatriation be interpreted as setting, and what effects may that have on future policies?” is not silly or hyperbolic, and it shouldn’t be hand-waved away as mere “whataboutism”.
Well, I’ll grant that it’s not exactly the same as the vanilla whatabout.
Because, the normal whatabout is just avoiding talking about the rights and wrongs of X, by deflecting to talking about Y.
(As I’ve said previously though; it’s ok to talk about Y after stating an opinion on the current topic X though. That’s not whatabout).
But I disagree that “what precedent would this set?” constitutes a worthwhile argument in itself either.
Because either those other situations are qualitatively the same, or they aren’t. If they are the same, then great: we can just discuss and debate the merits of the Elgin marbles and it will be right to set a precedent.
If they are not the same, well let’s hear what the supposed critical differences are. And then we can discuss if the precedent of Elgin’s marbles will slippery slope over those differences.
In any case, the examples given by DrDeth were, in his opinion, more worthy of repatriation, therefore I’m not sure how relevant the precedent argument is in this context.
Which they have controlled for a short period, and the international community did not recognize it. This is a “whataboutism” argument.
Note the Ottomans were the recognized government there for about 400 years.
Based upon your arguments, the Greek Government would have no claim at all, just the City State of Athens.
The other artifacts I listed are looted or stolen outright, not sold by the recognized centuries long rulers.
The post you decry was made back in 2003, two decades ago.
Good points.
The Greeks already have excellent replicas.
Art museums outside France have lots of French art- in most cases, properly bought and sold. Museums outside the USA have American art, ditto. Does all art and artifacts and everything have to go back to it’s originating nation?
The Mona Lisa hangs in France, does it go back to Italy? Lady with an Ermine hangs in Poland, that too?
Yet another question: Is it even possible for a government to transfer ownership of cultural artifacts, if they want to? If we grant that it is possible, then what did Elgin need to do, that he didn’t? He contacted the government that owned them, he offered them money, they agreed to his price.
You can criticize that it was the wrong government, but the right government didn’t exist at the time. And in fact, if we’re insisting on the right government, it hasn’t existed for thousands of years. We can’t make a deal with the city-state of Athens, because that polity doesn’t exist any more. And if Athens becoming part of Greece was legitimate, then how is Greece becoming part of the Ottoman Empire not likewise legitimate?
The weird truth about most museums is that there’s not much to learn in one, at least as an adult. There’s lots to see, but the learnin’ is generally confined to snippets of text and audio. Museums are about spectacle and immersion and awe, but not really about absorbing raw information. And I say that as a lover of museums. Set me loose in one and go about your business, I’ll keep myself occupied for hours. But a lot of what I’m doing is taking pictures so that I can look stuff up later, or even stepping to the side and looking something up right now because this is so cool and I want to know more about it.
It’s different for children, of course. Children should be exposed to visually impressive stuff to kick-start interest in stuff. But as an adult, either of us would learn much more about any given exhibit in five minutes on Wikipedia than we would getting eyeballs on it in a museum.
Put it this way: imagine these two exhibits were going through your town.
- Sue, the aforementioned T-Rex from the Field Museum in Chicago, and one of the most complete skeletons of the kind ever found.
- A perfect recreation of Sue, indistinguishable from the real thing by the untrained eye.
Assuming all else is equal (cost, wait time, etc.), which is your preference to see?
The reality is that whether artifacts should be returned is based 5000% on how we feel about the two parties.
Witness the importance of returning art stolen by the Nazis vs. the silence about art stolen by the Russians (for example in The Hermitage).
It’s this aspect of the issue that gives me a bit of pause, not about the intrinsic merits of Elgin Marbles repatriation in its own right, but about the “optics” involved, and their influence (or lack of it) on other decisions.
The cause of Elgin Marbles repatriation has been a very fashionable topic among a lot of prominent, what we might call, “cultural influencers” of various kinds in the UK. None of whom I have ever heard making any similarly publicized arguments for repatriation of other, non-Greek, artifacts held in the UK.
To what extent is their passion, and that of a lot of the fans they’ve stirred up on this issue, rooted in an ingrained preconception about “Greeks” as fellow heirs of the “classical legacy” in art/culture/science/etc., or even more bluntly, as fellow white people? Is there an unexamined presumption that “the glory that was Greece” is somehow intrinsically more deserving of retaining or regaining its own cultural patrimony than all those other brown-folks countries?
That’s not “whataboutism”. That’s IMHO desirable caution about emotionally charged popular controversies dealing with history and culture, which are never totally separable from race. When somebody is passionately declaring that the Elgin Marbles issue has to be dealt with on its “own merits”, and all the other potential issues about repatriating cultural artifacts from elsewhere are somehow secondary or irrelevant, well, that line of argument seems a little odd to me.
In related news:
There is so much politics here, not least within the countries who want the artifacts repatriated.
For those who see hubris in the British Museum, what do you think of Egypt and its Parade of the Pharaohs?
I wonder if the Greeks will do something similar?
What is that all about?
Not just SEE but do research on. Museums mostly do not just display things , they research and examine them.
Gift link:
When the airplane of Germany’s foreign minister touched down in Abuja, Nigeria, this past weekend, it carried precious cargo: 20 Benin Bronzes, priceless artifacts that were looted in a violent raid more than a century ago, and which were finally coming home.
At a ceremony in Abuja on Tuesday, the German official, Annalena Baerbock, handed the stolen items back to Nigerian officials. “It was wrong to take the bronzes, and it was wrong to keep them for 120 years,” she said.
In a legal sense, the 20 artifacts Baerbock brought with her belonged to Nigeria even before she took off from Berlin; more than 1,100 bronzes in German museums have become Nigerian property since the countries signed an agreement in July. But Tuesday’s handover was an important symbolic gesture, and many more of the artifacts are expected to come back to Nigeria next year. Others will remain in Germany on long-term loan.