Exhibition Argues that Western Museums Destroyed History

It's a circular argument sort of question really: If Western museums had not created a market for antiquities, when would the nations now blaming them for destroying their history have begun to notice the importance of the world buried beneath them and taken steps to protect it from the armies of home-grown looters who sold it off? I suspect that's not one of the questions raised in the traveling exhibition "Lost History" which has recently moved from the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia to the Benaki Museum in Athens, but I wish it were:

The trade in looted antiquities has been a controversial topic among museum heads and cultural patrimony officials in recent months, with Greece and Italy demanding the return of illegally excavated artefacts from major museums, such as the Getty in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Now, a multi-media exhibition examining the trafficking of antiquities is travelling from the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia to the Benaki Museum in Athens. Organised by the Greek documentary and television production company Anemon, History Lost (until 22 October) traces the looting of archaeological sites around the world and aims to demonstrate how objects lose their historic value when taken out of their native setting. The show implies that the market for smuggled antiquities is largely due to the establishment of Western institutions such as the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum.

There's not much more information than that on the Anemon website, but there are a number of photos of children and a few adults with headphones on staring at a small screen, suggesting a good chunk of this exhibition could be delivered online and not require anyone to travel to Greece, but....

Getting back to that notion that "the market for smuggled antiquities is largely due to the establishment of Western institutions," though, I can't see any reason to argue with that, but the underlying indictment is that the establishment of institutions created to protect and cherish history has, in a large sense, had the opposite effect. From the Anemon website:

"The looting of archaeological sites is still widespread, and in some countries so severe as to undermine any hope of establishing a proper history of these lands.

Let us remember that the most important loss occasioned by looting, is the loss of information. With the destruction of such sites the context of the finds is lost, even if the finds survive..."

---Lord Colin Renfrew, archaeologist

Sidebar: Lord Colin Renfrew is listed on Cambridge's website as "Formerly Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research" (I'm sure they're not the same Disney and McDonald that spring to mind in the US, but it was too amusing to not point out in the context of someone quoted on what's destroying culture.)

So essentially, Western institutions are responsible for the destruction of the context of the objects looted to fill their coffers and that makes it much harder, if not impossible, to establish a proper history of these lands. I can accept that argument, although it seems a bit too convenient for those original countries, who now stand to benefit from the awareness of the importance of their culture that the dreaded Western institutions raised, not to mention the value of those objects they restored, cataloged, wrote about, and created an appreciating price tag for.

More than that, I wish countries like Greece and Cyprus could find ways now to collaborate with the Western institutions, without all the finger pointing. I in no way support the illegal practices we know brought many objects into the museums of Paris, New York, and LA, but I don't think it will benefit the modern states sitting over ancient cultures to continually alienate them in the long run either. There's a wealth of experience and information that could be shared to a mutual benefit. Prosecute criminals as appropriate, but stop short of hosting these traveling "shame on you" circuses, which could find as many villians in the original countries as they do overseas if they looked hard enough.