Be prepared. The great museums of Europe are about to see an invasion of former colonies demanding the return of their stuff. This week the governor of Easter Island, Tarita Alarcón Rapu, tearfully pleaded with the British Museum to have back her ancestor, immortally embodied in a statue in its possession. “You have our soul,” she said. Her audience must have cringed.
For Rapu’s people the statue, one of many, carries with it the spirit of her island. For Britain it is just a statue, stolen by a British frigate as a bauble for Queen Victoria in 1868. But then Britons can be equally dotty about the Stone of Scone and the crown jewels.
The figure joins a lengthening list of items now in contention. Egypt wants back the Rosetta Stone. Nigeria wants the Benin Bronzes. Ethiopia wants the Maqdala crown, and a sacred lock of its emperor’s hair. Various places on the Indian subcontinent claim the Koh-i-Noor diamond, embedded in a UK’s royal crown. There is also the matter of the Parthenon Marbles, which never goes away. This is the thin end of a sizeable wedge.
Most rows over “cultural appropriation” come from the wilder shores of identity lunacy. This appropriation is different. The fact that British and other museums are so frantic to hold on to their objects shows the power such things exert over nation states. To the British Museum, the Parthenon Marbles are like fragments of the true cross.
The first response to demands for restitution is simple. Concede to them. We have tons of other stuff in basements and attics. To be fair, this is starting to happen. France’s President Emmanuel Macron is legislating to “return Africa’s heritage to Africa”. The British Museum itself returns objects under permanent loan. The Benin bronzes are going to Nigeria and it has indicated a readiness to talk with Easter Island.
A deeper worry is what restitution will mean to the purpose of world museums. They really are the heirs to empire. Their apologists incant the curatorial shtick, that they are global custodians, a scholarly resource, a place that gives context to art. If context really matters, why not put the Lewis Chessmen or the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Parthenon Marbles back where they were meant to be enjoyed? The only real argument museums have, if pressed, is that possession is nine-tenths of the law.
The reality is that in the age of mass travel and digital reproduction, the convenience of a tiny group of scholars, or even a larger group of tourists, cannot seriously override the looming politics of national self-confidence. A museum, as French art historian André Malraux noted, has always been an artificial concept, a wrenching of objects not into context but out of it. The tossing together of disparate artefacts – most of them never displayed – is like burying them in a mausoleum. It suggests the museum is not about art or beauty but about acquisition, ownership and status.
Next week, the most exhilarating room in any London museum is to reopen, the cast court at the Victoria and Albert. Everything in it is fake – majestic, glorious fake – from Trajan’s Column to Michelangelo’s David, from Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise to the Nymph of Fontainebleau. It is a hugely enjoyable satire on what modern museology has become.
What we are not told is that the V&A’s copies survived only because its staff, during the “battle of the casts” in the 1920s, did not imitate museums across Britain and America in smashing all replicas as “unauthentic”. This was demanded by the trustees in deference to rich donors, who did not want their gifts appearing near “fakes”. Across America, thousands of perfect replicas of Europe’s greatest art works were simply removed and hammered to dust, leaving galleries empty. Americans were told to revere not what they could see, but what it was worth.
Museum objects can now be immaculately reproduced, in photography, film, hologram and cast. The ruins of Palmyra and Nineveh can be restored with 3D printing and carving, even using the original stone and sand. It may not be the same as the original, any more than gothic Chartres or medieval Bodiam are “the same”. The ancient obelisk that forms the focus of the British Library’s current Anglo-Saxon exhibition is made of polystyrene. I doubt if it worries anyone, any more than Venetian tourists dislike the horses of San Marco for being copies. Of course material antiquity can affect the aura of a work, influencing its rarity and thus its price, but not necessarily its intrinsic beauty.
The word most beloved of museums is authenticity. I accept that the British Museum’s ice-age exhibition in 2013 was moving because we were looking at objects carved 12 millennia ago. But that was exceptional. I do not despise a Nash terrace or a Rodin statue because it is a replica of an original. The glory of a Robert Adam ceiling lies in its design, not its execution. Enjoyment lies in the genius of what we see, not the age of its materials.
There is no reason why the Easter Island statue cannot be perfectly reproduced. If its spiritual content matters so much to the Easter Islanders, why on earth deny them the original? The issue is one of politics, not aesthetics. I fear that unlike art, politics never ages.