Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno

We stand in a time where the ancient, the historic, and the modern are colliding, and they intersect in the collections of historical nature.   As we look back in time, various antiquities have exchanged hands, crossed national lines that no longer exist, and end up in the hands of modern collectors.   Under modern laws, items of historical importance or evoke a country’s identity can be forcibly returned or reclaimed by the original country, but it is not so simple a process.  The way things work today, in the Indiana Jones Dilemma both sides — Jones’ insistence of taking items to a museum, and Belloq’s interest in selling a golden fetish on the collector’s market — would lose out to the nation of origin’s ownership of the item as a source of national identity and pride, even if that original society has long been displaced or replaced by younger cultures.  James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has written a book about this conflict at the point where national identity intersects with the efforts of museums.

In Who Owns Antiquity?, Cuno does his best to explain how we arrived at this current state of affairs, slowly modified from the earlier days when antiquities represented more financial assets rather than social assets.   While the book focuses mostly on museums (Cuno’s center of expertise), it does explain how private collectors have encountered greater difficulties in acquiring antiquities (even those only a few centuries old) of a historical nature that may have been removed ‘improperly’, whatever that may mean at the time.  Over the past century, nations have asserted greater efforts in claiming historical items as evidence of their long and varied culture.   Cuno identifies a flaw in Italy’s reclamation of Roman artifacts, or Iraq’s claims on Mesopotamian artifacts, as a subterfuge of a museum’s purpose, awarding items of educational or historical importance to a country that has no connection to the ancient society aside from an overlapping geographic location, who in turn uses the connection as a way to identify themselves as a long-lived and powerful country.

James Cuno

Who Owns Antiquity? weighs heavily on the stories of how nationalism has been used to manipulate various museums to represent what the country wants to present, but Cuno provides mostly his own opinions as evidence.   The documentation of antiquities used to feed nationalism dominates the book, and while interesting, a bit more reflection on options or solutions may have made the book more useful to people convinced by Cuno’s arguments.   The book itself is quite political in its purpose and tone, which isn’t a criticism, but readers should understand when reading that it takes the focused side of Cuno’s opinions, without significantly judging the other side of the debate.   That shouldn’t discredit the book, however: Cuno has held positions of high influence in well-respected museums for decades, and his thoughts should be considered with that weight behind them.

The highly iconoclastic view — seen by some as encouragement of looting and destruction of archeological sites — brings an intriguing position on the importance of historical collections to the countries they identify.   This makes for the most thought-provoking idea of the book, figuring out the line dividing a museum’s purpose in creating a sense of history, or whether it is presenting history as we would prefer to remember it.  It questions whether an ancient Roman sword is better placed in the hands of a private sword collector in Barcelona or an Italian historical museum:  each has their place, but is the one with a nationalistic purpose is authorized by law to win out in the end.  Cuno advocates that those who are able to care for an item and properly study it should get priority rather than a manufactured sense of national identity, and Who Owns Antiquity? is a scholarly treatise on why Cuno believes the system is being manipulated for purely political purposes.