AN ANTIQUE SCANDAL

Abstract

1 5 5 R A N A N T I Q U E S C A N D A L P A T R I C K M C C A U G H E Y James Cuno, currently director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been an internationally respected art museum figure with a distinguished career. He has been director, successively, of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College (1989–91), the Harvard University Art Museums (1991–2002), and, briefly, the Courtauld Institute in London (2003–4) before moving to the Midwest. He is known as a thoughtful and reflective professional, much preoccupied by the purposes and function of the art museum today. If the bibliography and notes to his recent Who Owns Antiquity? are anything to go by, he is an uncommonly well-read one as well. Hence when he writes about ‘‘museums and the battle over our ancient heritage,’’ the world is inclined to listen – and to be all the more shocked and dismayed by what he has to say. The crux of Cuno’s argument, more akin to a Manichean struggle as one his reviewers called it, is the contest between the humanistic , encyclopedic art museum with its roots in the Enlightenment , committed to the display and interpretation of divers cultures, and the emergent nationalist states who through their W h o O w n s A n t i q u i t y ? M u s e u m s a n d t h e B a t t l e o v e r O u r A n c i e n t H e r i t a g e , by James Cuno (Princeton University Press, 256 pp. $24.95) W h o s e C u l t u r e ? T h e P r o m i s e o f M u s e u m s a n d t h e D e b a t e o v e r A n t i q u i t i e s , edited by James Cuno (Princeton University Press, 232 pp. $24.95) 1 5 6 M C C A U G H E Y Y ‘‘retentionist’’ policies hoard their cultural property and patrimony , prevent its export, and cut o√ future acquisitions of antiquities by those enlightened encyclopedic museums, which are almost exclusively concentrated in western Europe and the United States. Cuno’s estimation of the encyclopedic museums knows no bounds: they ‘‘introduce us to the larger world of which we are part. They bear witness to the hybridity and interrelatedness of the world’s cultures. . . . Encyclopedic art museums are based on the eighteenth-century ideal of cosmpolitanism: ‘citizens of the cosmos,’ of the world, the universe.’’ Opposing such a self-evident boon for humanity are nationstates , new and old, which undermine these lofty ideals: ‘‘Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are based on the nineteenth-century idea of nationalism: that we are first and foremost a national, a member of a tribe determined by language, ethnicity and place. Emphasis on nationalism is on separateness: one nation separate from other nations. . . . Nationalism narrows its vision of the world.’’ Indeed, such nationalist cultural-property laws go beyond mere retention. They are a force for obscurantism and conflict. They ‘‘conspire against our appreciation of the nature of culture as mongrel, overlapping, and a dynamic force for uniting rather than dividing humankind. And they dangerously reinforce the tendency to divide the world into irreconcilable sectarian , or tribal, entities.’’ What precipitated this Manichean struggle and Cuno’s polemic has been the embarrassing and unprecedented repatriation of major antiquities from four of the most distinguished and prominent art museums in America: the Metropolitan in New York, the J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and, most recently, the Cleveland Museum of Art. They have been joined by a leading educational institution, the Princeton Museum of Art. However loud the museums’ protestations that they acted and acquired in good faith, the evidence is clear that they were buying from some of the shadiest figures in the antiquities trade. The names and activities...