Προκειμένου να κρίνουν οι τυχόν ενδιαφερόμενοι αν το άρθρο του Eakin είναι ή όχι επικριτικό των απόψεων Cuno, χωρίς να χρειαστεί να διαβάσουν όλο το άρθρο από το λινκ που έδωσε ο Agezerlis, βάζω εδώ τα παραθέματα που αποδεικνύουν κατά τη γνώμη μου του λόγου το αληθές:
(…) These are large and provocative claims, and despite Cuno's protestations to the contrary, seem designed less to forge common cause with archaeologists than to accuse them of "allying with the nationalistic programs of many of these nations" in order to gain access to sites. He also expends little effort confronting unscrupulous behavior by museums that has helped give the recent restitution claims such force. As a result, some critics have viewed Who Owns Antiquity? as so partisan that they have not bothered to scrutinize its arguments. This is a pity, because whatever one makes of Cuno's thesis, it brings into focus some urgent questions—for museums and for archaeology—that have yet to be given much attention.
(…) Cuno's Manichaean view of cultural property—with national laws facing off against cosmopolitan museums—
(…) Various objections can be raised about this story. To associate encyclopedic museums with the Enlightenment rather than with the rise of the nation-state ignores, for example, the extent to which such museums —in France, Germany, and Britain—were themselves essential (and sometimes rapacious) instruments of late-eighteenth- or nineteenth-century nationalism; they often served to project imperial ambitions and create aesthetic links between their nations and the great civilizations of antiquity. Also, the influence of partage was never as great as Cuno would like us to believe. While there were some exceptional archaeology expeditions by the large collecting museums, they relied heavily on the art market throughout the early twentieth century. Nor is it clear that the UNESCO convention has been much of a factor in recent repatriation efforts.
(…) Still, an overtly nationalist approach to cultural property may not be the worst fate for a country's ancient sites. In a discussion of twentieth-century Iraq, for example, Cuno recounts how the successful system of partage established by Gertrude Bell under the British Mandate broke down in the 1930s when Iraqi leaders—in particular the Iraqi nationalist Sat'i al-Husri, who became director of antiquities in 1934—began to see control and ownership of the Mesopotamian heritage as a crucial dimension of nation-building. By the time of Saddam Hussein, archaeological finds had become subject to what Cuno describes as "political manipulation" aimed at serving "the ends of the Ba'thist Party." Yet he does not mention that such state interest—however questionable its aims—also meant that, until the economic crisis of the 1990s, Iraq had almost no looting, and foreign archaeologists considered its antiquities administration one of the best-funded and most professional in the Middle East.
(…) Indeed, the recent emphasis on repatriation as a solution to antiquities disputes is unfortunate: tracking down unprovenanced artifacts that may have left a country years earlier does little to address contemporary looting problems, and it rarely makes the objects in question more meaningful to archaeologists or accessible to the public than they were in a foreign museum. But are concerns such as these grounds for doing away with cultural property laws entirely?
(…) The stark reality facing art museums today is that the era of large-scale collecting of antiquities has come to a close. In the United States, the situation is further complicated by the dependency of large museums on wealthy private donors and patrons, whose contributions have often related to their own interests as collectors.
(…) Of course the extent to which modern peoples are connected to their ancient territorial forebears can be debated—as Ingrid Rowland has argued, the link in the Italian case is much stronger than Cuno allows. But the larger problem with Cuno's argument is the assumption that the legitimacy of a country's laws depends on the veracity of the claims it makes about its origins, rather than on a more basic principle of sovereign power.
(…) Yet as other museum directors have demonstrated (…) the divide between collecting museums and foreign governments is already a good deal less wide than Cuno suggests. One of the last exhibitions organized by Philippe de Montebello at the Met before his retirement, for example, was "Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium BC." (...) the exhibition was a loan show based on extensive contributions from supposedly "nationalist" archaeological countries—including Turkey, Greece, and Egypt, as well as Georgia, Armenia, and Lebanon. (Remarkably, Syria also agreed to send over fifty works, but was discouraged from doing so by recent US legislation concerning countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism.) While, as Cuno stresses, the range of antiquities museums can acquire has been severely limited by national cultural property laws, "Beyond Babylon" suggests that there are many ways besides collecting for cosmopolitanism to flourish.
Indeed, the easing of restrictions on international loans—encouraged, in part, by innovative restitution agreements such as that between the Met and Italy—is already doing much to reconcile collecting museums and archaeological nations. (...) Past experience has shown that permanent acquisitions may do little to encourage cosmopolitanism in the countries from which the objects derive while increasing the threat to archaeological sites.
In contrast, lending can work both ways: the rich diversity of American, British, French, and German museums can be seen in countries that do not have international art of their own, even as loans from archaeological countries, like those in the Babylon show, provide Western museums with what can no longer be acquired outright. Rather than a threat to the cosmopolitan ideal, then, the new détente between foreign governments and American museums should be seen as an essential step in confronting the urgent problem of the destruction of archaeological sites.
Υ.Γ. 1: Βεβαίως και υπάρχουν εραστές της αρχαίας Ελλάδας στις ΗΠΑ. Από πού κι ως πού όμως ταυτίζονται με τις απόψεις Cuno;
Υ.Γ. 2: Το θέμα μικρή μόνο, μακρινή και έμμεση σχέση έχει με τα Ελγίνεια. Θα άξιζε ένα ξεχωριστό νήμα, αλλά αφού αποτελεί πια, ως μη ώφειλε, αναπόσπαστο τμήμα του παρόντος νήματος, το συνεχίζω εδώ.
