Yes, I heard the prog this morning as well. Jonathan Tokeley certainly had a bit of a chip on his shoulder but it was refreshing to hear his (the other side of) the story concerning the protection and repatriation of works of art.
While taking onboard Tokeley's statement that the people who built the Parthenon have little in common with the people now living in Athens (and therefore don't have as much claim to the Marbles as they make out to have) the Parthenon <i>does</i> have a claim on <i>itself</i>, and the fact that great chunks of it, in the form of the Elgin Marbles are at the British Museum and not where they were designed to be on the Parthenon, is not very good for the integrity of the building. It can be argued that the removal of the Marbles from Athens to the British Museum certainly saved them from degradation had they been left in situ (and also that more people get to see them at the BM than would be the case if they were back in Athens) but it can't be argued that they don't <i>belong</i> on the Parthenon but somehow <i>do</i> belong in a gallery at the British Museum (a gallery where quite a lot of posh and well-paying functions are held after hours incidentally ;-)
It's a tricky one, and I don't think there's a one-fit-all solution. In my humble opinion, objects in museums that still have strong religious or social links for people now living to the people (the ancestors who made them) should certainly be returned (provided that is that they're not returned to places or conditions where they might suffer damage); objects created by Australian aborigines for example perhaps fall into that category. I'm not sure that many Egyptian antiquities fall into the same category though - as Tokeley pointed out, the religion and society that produced Egyptian Antiquities has little or nothing to do with modern Egyptian society... but even that's a bit tricky. The religion and society that produced Stonehenge is not the same as modern British society but I think many Brits (especially us lot) would be a bit miffed if the Cairo Museum had one of the Stonehenge lintels in it's collection and refused to give it back :-) That's not quite as fanciful as it sounds; the beautiful Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket with, "...its runic inscriptions, was probably produced in Northumbria between 650 and 750. It is made of whale bone. Four of its five decorated panels are in the British Museum; the right panel (however) is in the Museo Bargello, Florence."*
I can hear myself beginning to witter, but surely in this day and age, with reproduction technology as good as it is, it's not beyond the wit of man to produce replicas of the Elgin Marbles, the displaced panel of the Franks Casket etc, put those on display in foreign museums and return the origins to the places where they were first made - then again, as both you and Tokeley rightly point out, it's probably all about money and how much of it can be made by 'owning' the originals.
* http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Tour/Personal.objects/Franks.html
|
