The pirates of history—This is a tale about a different type of swashbuckin’ renegade that sailed the seven seas.
O.K. so most of these pirates only sailed one short sea, and most had education, and they often had the blessing of the governments of home and abroad—but they were pirates just the same. Go to almost every older city in the Western World and mostly on prominent display, or occasionally tucked away down some back street, you’ll find their booty. Hundreds if not thousands of Egyptian pyramids and tombs, even many Greek and Roman sculptures and edifices have been unearthed from their homes and put on display halfway around the world.
I have been to a bunch of these old museums and it has gotten old, it gets to the point where all the Egyptian rooms look the same. However, the magnitude of destruction remains. I always wonder, what does the place where these come from look like. In some cases, nothing remains, yet in others, like the removal of the Parthenon (Elgin) Marbles, their home remains, and is now waiting for their return. Rarely have I seen a museum exhibit address the fact that these items once had another home, and if I do, it is always about how it was an engineering marvel to move them—of course it was, they weren’t designed to be portable—but almost never anything about the affect that these moves have had on the place where they came from.
I will admit, that in many cases moving these objects was the only thing that saved them from destruction—that is not always the case. There was an article that I once read on the Elgin Marbles, and the “white man’s burden” mentality behind moving them from Greece to Britain—I wish I could remember the author. It involved the chance to return the Marbles back to their original home, the Parthenon. Lord Elgin had them removed originally because he felt that they were too beautiful to be left to the Greek government—at the time fairly primitive by our standards—to manage. In recent years Greece has asked for them back, but Britain claims they have become such a part of British culture it would be impossible to remove them.
I personally feel torn on what to do with these objects that have already been moved halfway across the world. They have often found good homes in their new locations, open to opportunities that the sometimes remote—admittedly not always—home locations would not be able to provide. However they are often the only bits reminding people of their culture of the past, what good is it in this respect if people have to travel from Greece to London, or from Egypt to New York to discover it?
What do you think?
Well let’s first review some facts. Lord Elgin paid £39,000 for the marbles when he did he was very meticulous and arranged for the Turkish government to produce documents giving him ownership as well as the right to remove the marbles from Greece., he did this, removed a national treasure from Greece which had been there for over 350 years give or take (Using Ottoman Empire as a marker). Lord Elgin then agreed to then sell the marbles to Parliament as long as the museum held the marbles within the country, which they did, do and always will, the title to the marbles is unassailable, the Greeks knowing this decided to pull several Public relations stunts instead of suing them in European courts because they would not win. Furthermore if the British decided to give/sell the marbles back they couldn’t! they don’t technically own them, their trustees do, to avoid the government from selling/giving works of art or national treasure for short/long term political gain or to raise money (as did in Russia, 1920’s). with that being said, it will not happen. However the claim that the marbles are too much a part of British history/culture is baloney They are Greek History, culture and should be there however lets not take for granted the manner in which they were treated, the marbles were used for target practice, the marble was burned to make lime for mortar, then took a direct hit from the venetian cannon, the Parthenon was basically in ruins and Lord Elgin did the world a favor, now over 5 million people see these magnificent works free of charge every year. So although I believe the Greeks should have them they did not prove to appreciate their significance and beauty and as a result they’ve lost arguably one of the world’s most beautiful pieces of art.
ReplyDeleteMuseums conjure a kind of unassailable authority--when you're in one, it's easy to forget that collections have long and complicated lives. But the act of collecting itself does violence to extent collections that themselves could only have been assembled by disturbing previous collections and so on. It's a curious chain of events. I wonder if there is ever a time when an object is not part of a collection, even though the criteria for belonging may not be evident.
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