Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case? (Update)

Freakonomics Radio - Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

This episode of Freakonomics Radio explores the complex and often contentious issue of returning looted art to its countries of origin, focu

Key takeaways

• Museums are increasingly returning looted artifacts, reflecting a shift toward ethical accountability.
• The repatriation process involves not just legal ownership but also deep cultural and spiritual significance for source communities.

Main topics

• Colonial-era art theft
• Museum ethics and restitution

Notable quotes

"It's like Olympic Games for restitution."

Conclusion

While returning stolen art presents legal and logistical challenges, especially across centuries and shifting political

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We are currently replaying a three-part series we made a few years ago called Stealing Art is Easy, Giving It Back is Hard. As part of this update, we have refreshed facts and figures as necessary, and in this episode, we've included some new material. This is part two of the series. Last week, we began with a simple question. How do the artworks and artifacts that you see in a museum wind up in a museum? Speaker 7 (0:33) For a long time, the entire art world didn't ask questions. The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us. Speaker 2 (0:48) Guess what? My kids know it's looted. But the museum world is changing. Museums are now returning dozens of objects every single year. Speaker 4 (0:59) It's like Olympic Games for restitution. Even though technically we Speaker 7 (1:05) legally acquired these, the origins of the acquisition was illegal. So Speaker 2 (1:10) therefore, everything else was tainted as well. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will explore one dramatic case that isn't settled yet. The disruption Speaker 5 (1:20) of the attack on the kingdom cannot be overemphasized. Most Speaker 4 (1:24) important pieces went directly to the British Museum. They even took... Speaker 2 (1:30) The bolts from the doors. It turns out that stealing art can be relatively easy, but giving it back, that's the hard part. The job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art. Yeah, put it in a pit, melt it. The second episode in our series about returning art starts right now. Speaker 7 (2:00) This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Speaker 2 (2:16) Matthew Bogdanos is a former Marine colonel who now runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. We met him in our previous Speaker 1 (2:24) episode. We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures. If it's legal, great, we should keep it. But if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin. But how does that happen? Speaker 2 (2:40) If a museum or a private collector on Fifth Avenue has a 3,000-year-old treasure that is found to have been looted or otherwise stolen, the country of origin may not even exist anymore. So how Speaker 1 (2:52) does Bogdanos manage that? Every country treats these differently, but we have yet to have a country who hasn't just been over-the-top appreciative and extraordinarily gracious. We've returned an antiquity to Iran. Wait a second. The U.S. doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran. What do I care? I'm not a politician. We returned a piece to the Palestinian Authority. Now move the map to Southeast Asia. India, Thailand, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. For that area of the world, these antiquities are idols. They're worshipped. And the number of times I have gone into a temple in India. in Southern India particularly, and it's empty. And they're still worshiping the empty pedestal. Or they have a photograph of an idol that was stolen. Or they have a wax or wooden model. And now this goes in someone's Fifth Avenue apartment? Get the hell out of here. I mean, are you kidding me? So we never lose sight of the fact that at the other end of... Our entire process, the prosecution, recovery, and repatriation, there's a community on the other side. Bogdanos makes all this sound rather Speaker 2 (4:07) clear-cut, and that makes sense. He is a prosecutor. He's guided by the law. And the law, while complicated, is also decisive. It declares a winner and a loser. Legal possession or illegal possession. But art is even more complicated than the law. Art is Speaker 6 (4:27) a place where our deepest spiritual values meet the marketplace. So that causes all kinds of questions. I mean, how do you put a price on art? People do. It's a vast marketplace. And strange things happen when you Speaker 2 (4:42) mix Speaker 6 (4:43) the most spiritual with the most commercial. Speaker 2 (4:45) That is David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. In 2022, he published a piece called Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art? It's one thing when, Speaker 6 (4:57) you know, there's a war in Ukraine and the Russian forces break into a museum in a Ukrainian city and they take the artworks and they put them in crates and they take them back to Russia. And then the war ends five years later and there's a peace treaty. That art, we know where it came from. It had a possessor. The possessors are still alive. They are institutions that still exist. And we can arrange for the art to come back from Russia to the museum in Ukraine from which it was taken. But when we're talking about lapses of 100. 200, 500 years. The whole concept of theft becomes kind of cracked. The second most famous Greek artwork in a European museum is the Pergamum Altar in Berlin, which is unearthed by German archaeologists. Pergamum was a city on the west coast of what is now Turkey. The artists who made the work were Greek. The king who commanded the work was of mixed Greek and Macedonian origin. And the taxpayers who paid for it spoke all the mingled languages of what was then Asia Minor, Anatolia, and some of them were Semitic and some of them were other vanished groups. So who gets it? Turkey, Greece, Macedon, Syria? Because that's probably the place that is closest to the culture of the people who paid the taxes. I mean, it's gone. That world is gone. So there is no one to give it back to. It's just an Speaker 2 (6:12) illusion. Speaker 2 (6:14) I went back to Matthew Bogdanos, the prosecutor, with David Frum's argument. Now, there are those who would say that your position is noble but naive in that you are putting a physical piece of property into the hands of someone who may be a generation or 10 generations removed from the origin, from either the creator or the owner. There are a number of ways that could be problematic. Those pieces might be sold into the black market, wind up in the palace of some Gulf state prince or a Chinese or American billionaire. So how do you think about Speaker 1 (6:49) those potential bad outcomes? Let's see. I've been in three wars. I've had six combat tours. I'm a career homicide prosecutor. No one has ever actually called me naive before. Speaker 1 (7:01) You're welcome. I've seen mass graves in Kosovo and Iraq. So no, I'm not naive. I recognize the world. And that's where I get to say to you, we're not the Acme Judgment Company. We don't get to pick and choose. We have a burglary in the Upper East Side. This person has 19 televisions and 18 of them are stolen. When we catch the guy. Do we get to say, you have 19, you don't need them back. We're going to keep them or we're going to give them to other people. That's not how that works. All right. And if our victim is a country whose political regime we don't particularly care for, tough. We actually have a very good relationship with the countries that we operate with on our level. So I'm talking about the Ministry of Culture or the Ministry of Antiquities. We actually require that these countries sign a document at the repatriation ceremony promising that they will maintain the antiquity that's being returned and wait for it. publicly display it. And is that document enforceable? Is it legally enforceable? Almost certainly not. But here's how it's enforceable. The next time you have an antiquity from that country that's looted and you call me, am I really the person you want to piss off? Do you really want to say, I know we promised Colonel Bogdanoff in the Manhattan DA's office that we're going to maintain this and we're going to publicly display it. But you know what? Forget that. Oops. And the next time we have an Iranian antiquity, Mr. Minister, I'm so sorry. Believe it or not, these countries really honor these requests. In India particularly, it's really heartwarming. They will send us videos. Of the community receiving their idol back. And I'm telling you, it's insane. Like 50 people screaming and yelling and singing and chanting. And they're holding this, you know, 150 pound idol up over their heads as they march it into the temple. We've had these things in Cambodia. We see these ceremonies in Egypt. It's followed from the plane right to its resting place in the museum in Cairo or in Lebanon. We have ongoing relationships across the globe with all these countries. It's in their best interest to honor their agreement with us. So we are not returning stuff that is then getting put on the market or being put in storage rooms. Speaker 1 (9:40) If you were looking for Speaker 2 (9:41) the single most interesting case of returning art or restituting or repatriating art, as various people call it, I would nominate the case of the Benin Bronzes, although that name is a bit misleading. Some of the pieces are indeed made from bronze, but many are not. And while there is today an African country called Benin, just west of Nigeria, the bronzes came from the historic kingdom of Benin in what is now Edo State in southern Nigeria. In any case, the Benin bronzes are a massive collection of art, artifacts, and religious objects that have been displayed for years in more than 160 museums around the world, including the Smithsonian in the U.S. the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Kelvin Grove in Glasgow, and especially the British Museum in London, which is the motherlode of Benin bronzes and which plays a starring role in our story. The British Museum is surely one of the world's great museums. Some people consider it the greatest, especially for antiquities. But others consider it, how shall we say this, a trophy case. for the spoils of war. Here, putting it far better than I ever could, is the English comedian James Acaster. A Speaker 8 (11:02) long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat and we robbed, and this will sound far-fetched, everyone in the world. And we got all the swag, didn't we? And we took it back to old Blighty and we hid it, this is the clever part, we hid it in a museum. Speaker 8 (11:22) Now, a few of you are sitting there. I can see your angry faces. Like, so what? Fighters, keepers, shut up. Hey, man, a while ago, a lot of your ancestors stole loads of stuff from my ancestors. Yeah, I'm here to take them home. Let's right this wrong. What do you say? I don't think so. We're still looking at it. Speaker 2 (11:44) How true to history is James Acaster's version? Let's find out by doing what we usually do, which is calling up the academic experts. Speaker 3 (11:53) Hi, so my name is Professor Dan Hicks. I work at the University of Oxford as a curator at our anthropology museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum. Speaker 2 (12:04) Okay, so where does this story begin? Speaker 3 (12:06) Yeah, okay, so if we wind back to 1884. and Berlin and the meeting of the European nations in the Berlin Congress. This Speaker 2 (12:17) is where they sit down with a map of Africa and say, you get this, I get that, that kind of thing. Exactly, exactly. Speaker 3 (12:23) And so what is now Nigeria was part of the pink area for the British, but not part of empire at that point, not turning them into colonies at that point. There are other entities. There are protectorates. There are areas controlled by the companies, in this case, the Royal Niger Company. The Speaker 2 (12:41) Royal Niger Company was a trading firm that essentially served as an arm of the British government. Speaker 3 (12:47) So we have to imagine this as a corporate and militarist form of empire. And really, this is all about the palm oil. It's about the rubber industry. Speaker 2 (12:59) In 1892, The Royal Niger Company signed a trade treaty with the Oba, or King of Benin. Within just a few years, it was decided that the Oba wasn't as cooperative as Britain would have liked, and they sent an expedition to Benin to work things out, headed up by one James Phillips. Things didn't work out at all. The group was attacked, and Phillips and