Message #107290

[Bianca]

The great encyclopedic museums were predicated on the idea that their local public constituted the world’s best people and hence the most deserving to stand in the presence of high culture. It is either naive or tendentious to argue that they were founded instead to serve some great multicultural vision of human fraternity.

Indeed, a certain basic confusion of arguments nags Cuno’s book from beginning to end.

However earnest its purpose, Who Owns Antiquity? plays so fast and loose with history and logic in its opening chapters that it cannot possibly gather together its dissipated forces to deliver the intended final punch, which is a plea for those great encyclopedic museums to act as peacemakers in today’s fragmented, polarised, conflict-ridden world. Peacemaking is a novel role for institutions that were founded to serve as the monumental trophy cases of great powers.

Cuno takes special pains to disparage the very country that should be one of his most promising allies in his new humanitarian mission for large museums: Italy. His opening chapters aim a few choice blows at Italian antiquities laws for their ‘‘nationalist retentionist’’ folly, and a long footnote blasts Rutelli for ‘‘political antics’’.

Yet when the book moves on to specific examples of nationalism and its perils, it concentrates on the history of Ottoman and then modern Turkey, 20th and 21st-century Iraq, and the People’s Republic of China, nearly bypassing Italy altogether. Each of the countries that Cuno considers at length has certainly posed dangers for its archeological record in our time, but for drastically different reasons, and they are all still struggling out of the Third World into the First.