yohn Oliver stormed Western museums and their collections of stolen artifacts, as well as the current antiquities market, on Sunday at Last Week Tonight. He explained that antiquities from the Global South – particularly Latin America, the Middle East and Africa – were stolen and preserved in European and American museums “on a much larger scale than you might imagine”. A 2018 report commissioned by the French president, for example, found that more than 90% of Africa’s total cultural heritage was held outside Africa by major museums, which house sprawling collections of “essentially stolen goods.”
“We don’t have time to sum up the entire history of colonialism and looting – there are a lot of stolen artifacts we can talk about tonight,” Oliver said, but to “say more with less focus on the British Museum.” Honestly, if you’re ever looking for a piece Lost antiquities, you’ll find nine times out of 10 in the British Museum,” he noted. “It’s basically the largest lost and discovered company in the world with both ‘missing’ and ‘found’ in the heaviest quotes possible.”
The British Museum and others claim that they are noble places, where the treasures of the world can reach the widest possible audience. “Obviously, the idea of museums as a place for people to connect with our shared history and with cultures around the world isn’t fundamentally bad,” Oliver explained. “But it also doesn’t quite represent the actual history of how many museums have sprung up.”
He recalled the original patron of the British Museum, Sir Hans Sloan, who was married to the heiress of a Jamaican sugarcane plantation employed by slaves. Oliver said that Sloan purchased much of his collection with this fortune, “which means that the foundations of the museum are closely linked to slavery and colonialism.”
Oliver noted several stock responses from Western institutions on the issue of returning stolen artifacts. Firstly, these artifacts were obtained at a different time, and one cannot judge the present by the standards of the past.
Except, as Oliver pointed out, people knew it was a moral offense at the time. After the British army raided an Ethiopian kingdom in 1868 with a representative of the British Museum trying to select the items, British Prime Minister said He had “deeply regretted … that these articles were thought to be suitable for the British Army to take them away” and urged that they be held only until they were recovered.
“He was saying that in 1868,” Oliver exclaimed. “We didn’t even know how to fix UTIs without leeches at the time, but we knew raiding other countries for shit was a very unfortunate thing, a British term meaning ‘hard sex’.
Another argument is that stolen artifacts would be safer under the care of Western institutions than in their home countries, but some museums’ track record is “mixed at best,” Oliver said. He noted that the Elgin marble from Greece in the British Museum was permanently damaged by wire brushing and a harsh cleaning agent in the 1930s.
Then there is the argument that these museums are a repository of world treasures open to all, which is “only true if you have access to the museum in question, and it is also worth noting that most display only a small portion of their collections,” Oliver said. The British Museum, for example, has a collection of about 8 million objects, but only 80,000 of them are on display. “It can be very upsetting to people to discover that their heritage, which is often part of today’s vibrant culture, is sitting in storage in the underground loot prison of the British Museum.”
Antiquities theft is not a crime of the past—”the practice still largely continues,” Oliver explained, turning his attention to the modern antiquities market, which includes flea dealers and museums or notorious auction houses, such as Sotheby’s, making a quick source search.
Oliver said many of the deals use prolific Western institutions to “wash their reputation”, such as Subhash Kapoor, the former major source of Asian art for museums. The Met currently has 86 of it in its collection. Kapoor has been identified as a stolen goods dealer with fine stories, most commonly that the items came from his girlfriend’s family collection. “You’re probably thinking, ‘That’s so stupid, it’s only going to work on a bunch of real ding-dongs,'” which I’d say you’re absolutely right about. “It seems to have worked in the Mate 86 times,” Oliver said.
He continued, “There’s just a level of egregious cruelty on display here, and to be fair, some institutions are finally coming to terms with it.” “The reality is that museums must be asked tough questions about every aspect of their acquisition and their collections as part of a long-awaited conversation about the provenance of their items and whether anyone wants to recover them.
“The groups to which those objects originally belonged should lead this conversation, for while it is clear that museums should not violate the law, they should not violate the rules of public decency either,” he concluded. “There is a lot that we have to do to estimate the damages of colonialism past and present, but this should really be the easy part.”
In the meantime, Oliver offered an alternative: a virtual tour, hosted by Camille Nanjiani, of the Payback Museum – “the world’s first public museum dedicated to providing refuge to nations whose greatest treasures throughout history have been plundered by colonialism. A fool.”
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