James Cuno is a passionate advocate for those compendious museums styled as the "world under one roof" and located in Europe and north America. No harm in that, you may think: few who have the privilege to visit any of them can fail to be awestruck - and educated - by ones such as the British Museum, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum.
What reeks about Who Owns Antiquity? is the way in which this clever man bends his intellect to shore up an extreme ideology for "encyclopaedic museums", a relatively neutral term he employs to describe this superclass.
Cuno, who is the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, footnotes the alternative and far more controversial term "universal" with evident approval. What emerges is universalism taken to its self-serving conclusion.
Throughout this book, Cuno attacks what he calls "nationalist retentionist cultural property laws". It is through such language that he turns logic on its head. Laws designed to protect a nation's patrimony "are based on false assumptions… that the parameters of art and culture can be fixed - that the currency of influence can be stopped - and identified as national…"
He argues that living populations and modern geopolitical frontiers are disconnected from patterns of human occupation in antiquity. Ergo, modern Egyptians, Italians and Greeks have no greater rights over stuff found on their territory than a rich American museum has.
Even if the historic disconnect were true (which it isn't), this line of argument destroys the basis on which encyclopaedic museums claim title in their collections.
Disparagingly, Cuno asserts that "Cultural property is a political construct: whatever one sovereign authority claims it to be… It is said to derive from them and be a part of them. It is central to their identity… But can that possibly be true of antiquities?" Cuno has a neat line of rhetoric that slices the ground from under his own feet.
"Preservation, truth and access" is the secular trinity of principles to which Cuno anchors his encyclopaedic museum ideology. As far as preservation is concerned, there is evidence that the vast accumulation of vulnerable material held in encyclopaedic museums on both sides of the Atlantic outstrips the resources available to them to care for it properly.
As to truth, whose truth are we discussing here? If history is written by the victor, guess whose version gets told in the encyclopaedic museum?
But it is on access that Cuno's case for the encyclopaedic museum truly founders. Once again we experience linguistic vertigo as he asks, "Does it serve anyone's best interest to have stockpiles of antiquities inaccessible to the public…?"
No, but before criticising Italy and China for holding on to their antiquities, why not think about the "stockpiles of antiquities inaccessible to the public" inside encyclopaedic museums?
And lest we miss the point, these museums, Cuno assures us, really are accessible. You only have to ask a Nigerian farmer, a Cambodian labourer or an Iraqi refugee.
Cuno is particularly shameless in enlisting a rationalist of the stature of Edward Said to his cause. How can one disagree with the proposition that museums should promote understanding between peoples as a salve for a world torn apart by "conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America', 'the west' or 'Islam'"?
But it is monstrous for Cuno to claim that his ideology will create a bridge between the haves and have-nots in today's world. What Cuno advocates is what gives America a bad name internationally: riding roughshod over local sensibilities and international conventions to export a set of values rooted in inequality and self-interest.
Encyclopaedic museums are the legacy of an important history and cannot be uninvented. Nor should they, for there is something humbling and magnificent about the human project for which they stand.
What is at issue is how these museums renegotiate their role as democratic cultural embassies, acting in our name in a deeply conflicted world.
Tristram Besterman is a freelance writer and adviser on museums and cultural issues
What reeks about Who Owns Antiquity? is the way in which this clever man bends his intellect to shore up an extreme ideology for "encyclopaedic museums", a relatively neutral term he employs to describe this superclass.
Cuno, who is the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, footnotes the alternative and far more controversial term "universal" with evident approval. What emerges is universalism taken to its self-serving conclusion.
Throughout this book, Cuno attacks what he calls "nationalist retentionist cultural property laws". It is through such language that he turns logic on its head. Laws designed to protect a nation's patrimony "are based on false assumptions… that the parameters of art and culture can be fixed - that the currency of influence can be stopped - and identified as national…"
He argues that living populations and modern geopolitical frontiers are disconnected from patterns of human occupation in antiquity. Ergo, modern Egyptians, Italians and Greeks have no greater rights over stuff found on their territory than a rich American museum has.
Even if the historic disconnect were true (which it isn't), this line of argument destroys the basis on which encyclopaedic museums claim title in their collections.
Disparagingly, Cuno asserts that "Cultural property is a political construct: whatever one sovereign authority claims it to be… It is said to derive from them and be a part of them. It is central to their identity… But can that possibly be true of antiquities?" Cuno has a neat line of rhetoric that slices the ground from under his own feet.
"Preservation, truth and access" is the secular trinity of principles to which Cuno anchors his encyclopaedic museum ideology. As far as preservation is concerned, there is evidence that the vast accumulation of vulnerable material held in encyclopaedic museums on both sides of the Atlantic outstrips the resources available to them to care for it properly.
As to truth, whose truth are we discussing here? If history is written by the victor, guess whose version gets told in the encyclopaedic museum?
But it is on access that Cuno's case for the encyclopaedic museum truly founders. Once again we experience linguistic vertigo as he asks, "Does it serve anyone's best interest to have stockpiles of antiquities inaccessible to the public…?"
No, but before criticising Italy and China for holding on to their antiquities, why not think about the "stockpiles of antiquities inaccessible to the public" inside encyclopaedic museums?
And lest we miss the point, these museums, Cuno assures us, really are accessible. You only have to ask a Nigerian farmer, a Cambodian labourer or an Iraqi refugee.
Cuno is particularly shameless in enlisting a rationalist of the stature of Edward Said to his cause. How can one disagree with the proposition that museums should promote understanding between peoples as a salve for a world torn apart by "conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America', 'the west' or 'Islam'"?
But it is monstrous for Cuno to claim that his ideology will create a bridge between the haves and have-nots in today's world. What Cuno advocates is what gives America a bad name internationally: riding roughshod over local sensibilities and international conventions to export a set of values rooted in inequality and self-interest.
Encyclopaedic museums are the legacy of an important history and cannot be uninvented. Nor should they, for there is something humbling and magnificent about the human project for which they stand.
What is at issue is how these museums renegotiate their role as democratic cultural embassies, acting in our name in a deeply conflicted world.
Tristram Besterman is a freelance writer and adviser on museums and cultural issues
By James Cuno
Princeton University Press, £14.95
ISBN 978-0691137124
Princeton University Press, £14.95
ISBN 978-0691137124
