PUP author James Cuno debates Christopher Hitchens on whether the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece or remain in The British Museum. I read Hitchens’s moving and convincing piece in Vanity Fair about his visit to the new Greek museum, but I am also swayed by Cuno’s arguments about the importance of encyclopedic museums and protecting artifacts from less than ideal circumstances in their source countries (see the Iraq museums being looted, or deliberate attempts by new regimes or religions to destroy artifacts of earlier times).
Here, James Cuno interviews Neil MacGregor about the origins of the British Museum and the role of encyclopedic museums through history, a subject further explored in MacGregor’s contribution (To Shape the Citizens of “That Great City, the World”) to the edited volume Whose Culture?
You may also be interested in reading Hugh Eakin’s take on both Whose Culture? and Who Owns Antiquity? (James Cuno’s solo-authored work on the subject of antiquities and nationalism) in the May 14th issue of the New York Review of Books.
Barbara Sivertsen’s new book THE PARTING OF THE SEA officially published on April 8th, which happened to be the first day of Passover. It is fortuitous timing since the book explores the actual geological events that inspired the biblical book of Exodus.
David Klinghoffer discusses this phenomenon on the site Beliefnet.com–read about it here.
And Publishers Weekly picked Sivertsen’s book as their “Web Pick of the Week.” Read the review here.
Robert Fulford considers the intertwined issues of art nationalism and museum rights in his column for The National Post from this past weekend. He prominently features Whose Culture? an edited collection of musings from museum directors and philosophers that continues the controversial work James Cuno initiated in Who Owns Antiquity?
Two questions dominate our consideration of the fate of the world’s ancient heritage. The more vexing and urgent one — how can we prevent the looting of archaeological sites and the illicit trade in antiquities -– is not the topic of this article. The second one is.
“Where do the great treasures of ancient art belong? In Western museums or in countries where the civilizations that created them once flourished?”
This question turns on two presumptions:
that antiquities are not where they belong, and
that civilizations create things and certain modern nation states have inalienable rights to them as heirs to those earlier civilizations.
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